how to delete autorun.inf from your flash drive

In this short tutorial, I’ll tell you how to delete autorun.inf from your flash drive. It’s very simple if you follow the step-by-step guide and all the command required.

First step, open command prompt. If you don’t know how to open command prompt, open Run in Start Menu, and type cmd. It’ll automatically run command prompt for you.

Make sure that the infected flash drive is connected to your computer, and memorize the letter assigned to the particular drive. Next, type the letter assigned to the drive. For example, if you pendrive is assigned for letter F, then type F: in the command prompt. Be extremely sure that you’d entered the correct letter!!

Next, check for file attribute in the desired drive. Type attrib in the command prompt. Then, the lists of all file with respective file attribute will be displayed. Search for autorun.inf in the lists.

Here are the lists of command line for attrib command:

r is for read only file

s is for system file

h is for hidden file

c is for compressed file

You can simply change the attribute of each file by altering the sign (+/-) before the letter r, s, h, c. Positive sign (+) will assign the attribute to the file, and negative sign (-) will remove the attribute from the file.

For instance, if you see that the attribute for autorun.inf as RSH, then, autorun.inf is a read-only, system and hidden file. All these three attributes will not allow any changes to be made to that file. Hence, you’ll have to change all the three attributes by typing this:

F:\>attrib –r –s –h autorun.inf

So now you have remove the file attribute, and you can delete the file by using the del command.

F:\>del autorun.inf

You have successfully removed the infected autorun.inf file. Don’t worry, new autorun.inf will be automatically created when you plug your flash drive into computer.

Please note that this method can also detect any other unwanted program that may have been secretly installed on your flash drive. Use the same method to change the file attribute, and then delete the file. If the unwanted program still running in your pc, kill the process, repeat the steps, and quickly remove your flash drive. Scan your computer afterwards.

Kindly leave comment if you have problems after these steps.