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I recently began reading about the autorun.inf entries on Microsoft's website.

I read the section about [DeviceInstall]. It seems to give the 'device' being inserted the capability to install its own driver.

I tried it, but still Windows is automatically installing its own drivers instead of searching for the drivers specified in the autorun.inf

Is the [DeviceInstall] entry still allowed for external hard drives under Windows 7? What are the entries allowed in the autorun.inf under Windows 7?

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Your hypothesis is incorrect. The MSDN article on Creating an AutoRun-Enabled Application says:

You use DriverPath to specify a directory path where Windows XP searches for driver files, which prevents a lengthy search through the entire contents.

You use the [DeviceInstall] section with a driver installation to specify directories where Windows XP should search the media for driver files. Under Windows XP, entire media are no longer searched by default, therefore requiring [DeviceInstall] to specify search locations.

What this means is that using the DriverPath command in the DeviceInstall section of the Autorun.inf file, you can only let Windows know where to look for drivers on a driver installation media.

It doesn't say anything about giving you permission to force installation of an unsupported or invalid driver. If Windows can't find a valid device driver in the path specified by DriverPath, it'll start looking elsewhere and maybe install a generic driver (if available).

To answer your second question, I'll quote this line from the MSDN article you linked with the question:

The [DeviceInstall] section is only supported under Windows XP

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