Bug 18005

Summary: autorun.inf file on isos seems useless
Product: Mageia Reporter: Michael Eklund <willard>
Component: Release (media or process)Assignee: Anne Nicolas <ennael1>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED QA Contact:
Severity: enhancement    
Priority: Normal CC: ennael1, isobuild, mageia, marja11, nic, thierry.vignaud, tmb
Version: Cauldron   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
Whiteboard:
Source RPM: CVE:
Status comment:

Description Michael Eklund 2016-03-14 23:07:13 CET 
Description of problem:

The autorun feature when mounting an ISO image in Windows does not work properly. In Win98/XP you could run the autorun and then reboot and the Linux install would commence. This hasn't worked since Windows Vista i believe.

I have tested this on both EFI and a non-EFI machine, Win7 and Win10.

Reason for this report is that i wanted to do an install without burning a DVD or making a bootable USB.

Dosutils and rawwritewin is for backward compatibility for those using floppies. Even though many doesn't use them they should remain. But the autorun install does not work and should be removed i think.

/Michael
Marja Van Waes 2016-03-18 08:56:25 CET

CC: (none) => marja11, nic

Comment 1 Marja Van Waes 2016-03-25 09:45:15 CET 
(In reply to Michael Eklund from comment #0)
> But the
> autorun install does not work and should be removed i think.

Only now do I understand what you're talking about, after checking a Mga5 traditional DVD... I had never really noticed the autorun.inf file :-(

So this is about the autorun.inf file that contains 

   [Autorun]
   open=dosutils\autorun\autorun.exe
   icon=dosutils\autorun\mageia.ico

I do not know where that file comes from, maybe from bcd?

CC'ing some people who'll know

CC: (none) => ennael1, thierry.vignaud, tmb
Summary: Windows install autorun => autorun.inf file on isos seems useless

Thierry Vignaud 2016-06-17 14:25:06 CEST

Component: Installer => Release (media or process)
Assignee: bugsquad => ennael1
CC: (none) => sysadmin-bugs

Comment 2 Anne Nicolas 2016-07-28 22:05:26 CEST 
No it was written by hand a long time ago. We can fix it if people have a Windows install and can test it or remove it
Comment 3 Marja Van Waes 2018-04-27 16:06:17 CEST 
Assuming nothing changed, so setting it to Cauldron.

It should still be tested whether it does anything useful on a Windows system.

Severity: normal => enhancement
CC: sysadmin-bugs => isobuild
Version: 5 => Cauldron

Comment 4 Martin Whitaker 2018-04-28 10:32:03 CEST 
(In reply to Michael Eklund from comment #0)
> The autorun feature when mounting an ISO image in Windows does not work
> properly. In Win98/XP you could run the autorun and then reboot and the
> Linux install would commence. This hasn't worked since Windows Vista i
> believe.

I've never seen any reference to this ability, and I don't know how it could have worked. Surely when you reboot, any mount will be lost? Also, from a quick Google search, it seems that the ability to mount ISO images was only added in Windows 8...

Looking at the autorun source code, all it does when you press the install button is reboot the machine. After that, it's up to the BIOS and bootloader what happens.

There are various options for booting from an ISO image without burning a disk or dumping to a USB stick. Both the Windows boot manager and GRUB2 have the ability to boot from ISO image files. Also there's

  https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Installing_Mageia_from_ISO_on_disk

As far as I can tell, autorun is still doing what it was designed to do. I've tested it on a Windows 10 machine. The link to the release notes is wrong - it still references Mageia 1. Also the icon on the task bar is the Mandrake star. But apart from that, it looks OK.

CC: (none) => mageia

Comment 5 Thomas Backlund 2021-02-16 16:58:29 CET 
autorun does work as intended, listing the options.

but clicking on reboot does not automatically mean install will start unless the system has "start from optical media" as first boot option...

Status: NEW => RESOLVED
Resolution: (none) => FIXED