Blog Marco

When I installed AVG free last month it removed a few viruses including a file called "copy.exe". So whenever I go to "My Computer" (WinKey+E) and double click on any of my hard drives, including external and flash drives I get an error stating that "Windows cannot find "copy.exe". The only way I could get into the hard drive was to right click and select open or to simply manually type in the hard drive label into the address bar like c:, d:, etc...

Well the solution to this copy.exe conundrum is to get rid of a file called autorun.inf in each of the infected hard drives. Here's the solution to the problem...

Make sure you or the virus scanner is run through the infected hard drives/flash drives to make sure the virus files is gone.

Now, some forums said you could just select "show hidden files" from the options and this would enable you to see the "autorun.inf" file. This wasn't the case for me.

Also, some entries in the "autorun.inf" may be legitimate. So to check the file (even when you can't see the file) do this: type in the infected hard drive label followed by autorun.inf For example: f:\autorun.inf

This will load the autorun.inf file and should display it as a text file in notepad. If the only entry is that incriminating copy.exe then this is what I did. I tried to overwrite the file by saving a blank text file with the same name as autorun.inf. That didn't work because that inf file was "read-only". so I saved that blank file on the desktop and simply cut and pasted it into the drive, then selecting the overwrite file option. That should stop that annoying Windows cannot find "copy.exe" message every time you double click into a drive.

Problem solved!

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