help making a bootable cd

[Stealth]

I need to make a bootable cd-rom, I have tried nero, and winiso to do this, neither worked, my guess is that the boot image is looking to boot from device 0 (floppy) I really want to boot from a cd, can someone help, somthing quick and easy, I dont want to have to write my own code to do it LOL, any prog out thear that will help. TIA.

[Superman]

Are you making a boot disk or are you trying to boot from a disk?

[Stealth]

trying to boot from a CD, instead of a floppy to get int DOS, for format,fdisk,gdisk,ghost and various other DOS apps that I regulary use. all will not fit on a floppy, and I have a CD that I have all my small common windows progs on, drivers,burning software, setti ,folding@home, 3d mark ect, I want everything on 1 CD kind of like an all in one, the only thing I use floppy's for now is to boot anf to flash my bios, If I could gett that boot info on a cd it would be great.

[takiwa]

I have tried nero Click on the CD ROM (Boot) icon in the new compilation wizard. Uner the Boot tab, click the radio button next to "Bootable logical drive (must fit on the CD!)". In the pull-down box, choose A: drive. Put a boot floppy in A: drive, and click "New". Compile your disk and burn. The boot image from the floppy will be burnt to disk along with your data. You can make a boot floppy in any Windows OS, or download one from www.bootdisk.com. Hope that helps...

[Stealth]

Originally posted by takiwa
Click on the CD ROM (Boot) icon in the new compilation wizard. Uner the Boot tab, click the radio button next to "Bootable logical drive (must fit on the CD!)". In the pull-down box, choose A: drive. Put a boot floppy in A: drive, and click "New". Compile your disk and burn. The boot image from the floppy will be burnt to disk along with your data. You can make a boot floppy in any Windows OS, or download one from www.bootdisk.com. Hope that helps...

Tried That, didn't work even tested the floppy after to make sure it wasn't a bad floppy, It worked fine, tried three different boot disks and all worked fine, I then used nero to make a boot cd from the floppy's and none of them work from cd, the three boot disks I tried were origonal win 98 boot disk, origonal ME boot disk and then one I DL'd from bootdisk.com called essential boot cd, I also tried using winiso in the same manor, loaded the boot info from floppy and made it an ISO, riped it and same problem, no boot, I first thought it may be my cd rom and\or BIOS are not bootable, so I threw in a bootable copy of ME to see and it worked fine, booted right up.

[Thelemac]

Have you set your BIOS to boot from the CDROM first?

[takiwa]

Have you set your BIOS to boot from the CDROM first? That was my next question...:p

[Stealth]

sorry, yes I have set my BIOS to boot from cd, 1st=cd 2nd=1.44 3rd=HDD0. and my XP cd and ME cd both boot fine.

[Guero]

I have tried a few times to make a boot CD also. It never worked for me. I used Nero, CDRWIN, and followed different instructions and never got anything to work. Maybe a suggestion would be to examine the CDs that do work to figure out how to make it work.

[Stealth]

the reason OS's and such work is becous they have the proper software to do it, wish I did, to have a bootable cd, the cd must have a boot record and that boot record must be at sector 11h (17th decimal) in the last session of the cd (El Torito specification.) so just copying over a bootable image will not work. you must have control over whear the data is being writen to. Anyone know of any software that will do this? Nero CDRWIN Win ISO all say they do, but don't.

[o770]

Stealth, in the bootdisk.com front page there are links to different methods to make a bootable cd. i made one once using this one (http://www.nu2.nu/bootcd/). hope it helps.

[M@€$†®Ö™]

Man there is more hoops to jump through in creating a Bootable CD then a politician getting elected. Sheesh :(

Maestro

[Stealth]

Thanks for the link, a little more than I want to go through, I have also used that method before, with success. however I was looking for somthing simple. I will give EZ CD a shot and if that doesn't work, I guess I will have no choice. I have since discovered why WinISO does not work, The 2 files nessassary to boot are boot catalog and cdresq, bootcatalog should reside at LBA 0 and cdresq should be at LBA 774, however WinISO for whatever reason puts them at LBa 24 and 25 respectable. I got this info from am Image I made with Norton GHOST, that did boot just fine, only one problem, I try to make the image an ISO to edit the user data and thear are a ton of bad sectors, so I cannot modify the image. weel I hope this info helps someone out thear. I will let you all know if EZ CD 5 works.

[Stealth]

I have got it, verry easy, verry fast, Just use CD Mate in expert mode, worked like a charm, bootable and ISO image can be modified with WinISO or ISObuster, no bad sectors, perfect boot. Hope this helps the next fool who decides he just has to Have a custom bootable CD.

[Asheron]

i followed a tutorial on how to make a winxp boot disk and mine didnt work either, but the disk does work just not on boot

i wonder what i did wrong too

[Vfrjim1]

Funny, my Win2k Pro with SP2 worked like a charm :) Thanks for the link!!

[Captain Slug]

I've made several and here's the Image I have for everyone to download and reference when making boot CDs.

http://members.aol.com/captainslg/cdboot.zip

It DOES NOT include fdisk or scandisk or other tool (because they're copyrighted) so you'll have to add them to the CD as a file before you burn it.

I LOVE bootable CDs. They allow you to boot-to-prompt in under 10 seconds so you can get right to installing a new OS on a clean drive.

[Guero]

What is a good program to add files to this image file (.IMA) ???

[Captain Slug]

Originally posted by Guero
What is a good program to add files to this image file (.IMA) ???

I used WINImage (which is very easy to find on yahoo) and it can extract the image to a floppy. Then simply add other files you want access to during boot and re IMAGE the floppy.

But if you want to add other files you simply do so in the CD-Authoring program as you usually do when making other CDs.