finding autorun.inf files and deleting recycled directors from external hdd's

I recently had Belazhar help me go through the process of formatting my
hd after experiencing the Virut infection virus. The problem now what
was on my external hdd (had originally some infected exe's lurking
around that was detected by norton antivirus from plugging it into
another PC). Here's my questions.

1) However, I read around that
if you let the external hard drive go into auto play mode when you
first power up the unit, then that auto play can INITIATE a virus. Is
that true? Someone told me to look for an autorun.inf file. I couldn't
find it on the external hard drive even after allowing me to view hidden
files and folders from the windows explorer. If it has the scan and
then "autoplay" window pop up, does that necessarily mean that an
autorun.inf is existing in the root somewhere? If so, I was unable to
find it.

2) I may have screwed myself. While I was waiting for
one of Belazhar's replies in another thread, I took the external and
connected it to another pc (not connected to the network) because that
pc had norton antivirus and I wanted to scan it. It seems that while
scanning , it found a "recycled" folder that had some exe's and it was
quarantining it, but I wonder, if that happens, even if it's
quarantined, can those files still be used by a hacker to be used from
the quarantine folder?

3) Also, the norton antivirus kept scanning through some directories like the

external_hard_drive:\Recycler\

directory,
and yet, even after having the options of viewing hidden files and
folders, I wasn't able to see those directories from the root of the
hard drive. It wasn't listed in the global recycling bin on the desktop
either. How do I find this? Do I have to boot into safe mode to see
it?

Have you tried running a program like Malware Bytes or any other AV anti-malware program on the external drive?
Hello.
Since I helped you, there is a new and better tool developed to deal with autorun.inf flash drive infections.

Please download USBNoRisk to your Desktop and run it by double clicking the program's icon.

1. Wait a couple of seconds for initial scan to finish.
   
2. Connect all of your USB storage devices to the PC, one at a time, and keep each one connected at least for 10 seconds.
   
3. If there are more USB storage devices to scan, please take a note about the order in which these were connected.
   
4. After all the devices are scanned, right click in the Monitor tab, and choose "Save log". That will open the log in Notepad. Please copy and paste the log into this thread.
   

Explanation:
USB storage devices are all the USB devices that get their own
partition letter at connecting to the PC, e.g. flash drives (thumb/pen
drives, USB sticks), external HDDs, MP3/MP4 players, digital cameras,
memory cards (SD cards, Sony Memory Stick, MultiMedia Cards etc.), some
mobile phones, some GPS navigation devices etc.