How to create your own free CD autorun for HTML
and most file types.
It is easy to create an autorun CD or DVD for Windows and all it
takes are a few files (which we've supplied for free). The technique
can be used to open other file types, but HTML is used for a reason:
it is the most commonly supported by Windows (most PCs have a Web
browser) and it is flexible. You could use it to open other files,
such as a Powerpoint presentation, but it would require the end user
to have Powerpoint or the Powerpoint viewer on their system.
The autorun zip file we've prepared contains everything you need to
autorun a CD and open a HTML file. So download a copy - it's tiny
and free - see below for the download link.
Related link:
Autorun files
(2Kb)
Download autorun-
AutoRun.zip
So why can't an autorun open a HTML directly? It is because a
Windows autorun can only open an application (program) not a data
file (eg HTML). You cannot tell an autorun to directly open a HTML
file. Try it, and nothing will happen. To get around his problem, we
are using a .bat file which Windows will treat as a program. This
special file will then open the HTML file.
Assembling the CD
Download and copy the files to your root directory of the CD. These
are: autorun.inf, autorun.bat and index.html. You can put all sorts
of files on the rest of the CD. They won't affect the autorun. You
can test the autorun by burning the three files to the root
directory of a test CD-R. Open the CD drive and close it again.
Viola, you have just created your own autorun HTML CD. You should
change the contents of index.html to whatever you need. The
index.html supplied is only a test page.
Changes you can make
The autorun can open any type of file and display any message you
want. To make changes, open Windows Notepad (do not use Word,
WordPad or other Word processors). Now open the autorun.bat file
from within Notepad. The order is important, if you double-click the
autorun.bat file, it will try to run. So open NotePad and select
File-Open and choose the autorun.bat file. You'll see four lines of
code.
The first line after @echo (remember the space) will appear as a
comment in the autorun launch Window. This comment will be seen very
briefly by your end-users. It can be changed to anything you want,
but since it only appears for a second or less, don't make it too
wordy. If you wanted to say 'The CD is loading now...', the first
line of code will look like:
@echo The CD is loading now...
The second line of the code tells the .bat file to open to your
index.html file. If want to open a file by another file (eg
readme.txt), then it would read:
@start readme.txt
Make sure you leave the last two lines untouched (@cls and @exit) -
they must always appear last. Save the changes and you are done.
That that's all you need to create your own HTML autorun CD.
More options
To create a CD that will autorun to open the html file ‘index.htm’
would require:
[autorun]
ShellExecute=index.htm
icon=index.htm
Note: ShellExecute is not supported
under older versions of Windows (i.e. under Windows 95 or Window
98).
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