Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Making an autorun file

When you make a presentation it makes a good impression if your presentation (video, audio or .exe files) executes on inserting the CD. This can be achieved by autorun.
Autorun is a utility by which Windows™ users can automatically run any application on a CD or a flash drive when it is connected to the PC. It is achieved by a text file named autorun.inf which must be present on the root directory of the CD or flash drive. When inserted the OS looks for the autorun.inf in the CD, if not found then it shows the usual menu.
To use this utility all you have to do is create a autorun.inf file and save it on your CD or flash drive. You can also configure your autorun.inf to do much more.
To make a autorun.inf file, open Notepad and type in it:
[autorun]
open=myfile.exe
Save the file as autorun.inf (remember to select all files)

Now for the explanations:
[autorun] is the command for autorun utility.
open is the parameter that can be changed as per your needs (here it opens the file).
myfile.exe is the value of the parameter, you can change the extension depending on the file you want to open.

You can also make some changes to this basic file. For e.g.:
If your file is inside a folder you have to add the location as

[autorun]
open=first folder/second folder/myfile.exe

If you want an icon to be shown instead of the CD or flash drive icon (like in many software install CDs)
You can add this line:
[autorun]
open=myfile.exe
icon=icon.ico
You can add any file as icon with the following extensions:
.ico
.jpg
.png
.gif

So thats that all that I knew about autorun files.

No comments:

Post a Comment