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Tips
For Computer Related Problem |
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| Auto
Run : How
to create your own free autorun for a CD or DVD. |
Create
your own autorun CD or DVD
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 above for the download link.
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.
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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.
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