2 exact copies of autorun.inf, one works one doesnt

The 2nd .inf, which doesn't work, appears to have been saved as UTF-8 with a UTF-8 BOM.

The UTF-8 BOM means that the file starts with the binary sequence EF BB BF (in hex). But Windows expects autorun.inf files to be plain text, so it won't recognize this one as such.

My advice is to choose the plain-text option in your text editor when saving .inf files or similar.


As dxiv has said, this is caused by UTF-8 BOM.

The file editor you are using, Notepad++, can tell you the encoding of the file.

enter image description here

UTF-8 BOM adds header bytes to the file that breaks their compatibility with standard ASCII files, whereas UTF-8 without BOM (or just plain UTF-8) files are fully reverse compatible with standard ASCII file, assuming you do not use any UTF-8 characters.

Notepad++ also has a HEX editor plugin and you will be able to see these extra bytes with it:

enter image description here

Tags:

Windows

Filesystems

Usb

Autorun

Windows 10

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