How to create CD autorun menu

Autorun is a standard feature of the Microsoft Windows. The Autorun feature detects when a CD is inserted into the CD-ROM drive and runs an application based on the contents of the autorun.inf file located on the CD.

Do you wish to impress your customers with professionally designed menu that provide information about CD, show user manuals and help user to install software?

Typically, this requires programming skills or the use of specialized software with the visual menu designer. Too complicated? Why not create a nice menu of plain HTML pages? If you already have a website, you can create menus in just a few clicks. If you do not have a website, you can find a nice free template and fill it with his information in any editor, even Notepad.

1 Download and install HTML Compiler

You can download most recent version of SiteInFile compiler from our site.

2 Create the working directory

Place the pages and files in this directory. HTML pages should use only relative links to images and files.

3 Create new project

Run the compiler and click the "New" button to create a new project. Wizard will appear and you asks you to specify a home page for a project. Open dialog and choose index.html in the working directory.

4 Select output format

At the next step the wizard asks you to specify the format, select the EXE-format for creating executable. Also specify the file name and choose an icon for it.

5 Choose the properties of main window

We choose the parameters of the main window. Depending on the design of HTML pages you can choose a fixed size or allow users to resize the window.

6 Turn on/off menu features

Now you can customize the appearance, enable or disable the display of menus, toolbars, status bar, shortcut menu and its individual items. If you want to protect menu content from copying then disable "Print and "Copy to clipboard" items.

7 EXE file protection

This step can be skipped, because the password protection and expiration date used for creating eBooks

8 Exclude files from compilation

This is very important. The autorum menu should only contain text and graphics. It makes no sense to compile installers and manuals into one large EXE file. In this case, you will need to recompile menu each time you make changes. It is much more convenient to store frequently updated data separately on the disk. Therefore, in the "Direct Execution" proves what types of files should not be compile. Most often it is *.exe; *.dll; *.pdf; *.txt; *.rtf; *.doc;

9 Select compression level

The level of compression determines the speed of running the application, so you can limited to Normal.

10 Build it now!

You're done! You can compile and run your autorun menu.

11 Prepare autorun.inf

Create autorun.inf file in text editor with two strings:

[autorun]
shellexecute= {name of your compiled file here}

Place this file to the working directory.

12 Burn files on CD/DVD disk

Now you can remove all html pages and images from working directory and burn files on CD or DVD.