Unable to Open Drives on Hard Disk by Doing Double Click

I have helped many users solving this problem on their Windows XP system. On Windows XP if your computer got infected due to using the malicious PenDrive or other USB devices then sometimes when you will do double click to open any connected USB devices like PenDrive or external hard disk, you will get “open with” option instead of opening the drive in Windows Explorer.

When you double-clicking on the drives icons or right click on the drive>>explore in My computer, the drive does not open and it shows the open with menu.

This problem is generally caused by various viruses which got transferred from an infected USB device or by downloading malicious files from the internet which is now blocking or restricting your access to any of the drives and Windows Explorer.

This problem can be fixed very easily just by executing few commands. However, you may still open the USB drive; do the right click on the drive and then choose the open/explore option.

When this virus entered into your system, it automatically creates a file named autorun.inf in the root directory of each drive or every drive that you opened using the double click.

The infected “autorun.inf” file is a read-only and hidden file which also disable the option to enable show hidden file on your system to protect itself.

You have to just delete this file and restart your system to fix this problem.

Follow the set of commands below to show and delete the autorun.inf

1. Open Start>>Run and type cmd and press enter. This will open a command prompt window. On this command prompt window type the following steps.

2.  type cd\

3. type  attrib -r -h -s autorun.inf

4. type del autorun.inf

5. Now type d: and press enter for d: drive partition. Now repeat steps 3 and 4. Similarly, repeat step 5 for all your hard disk partition.
6. Restart your system and your problem will be fixed.

If you still having issues or unable to open the drive by doing double click then leave a comment below.