Can you burn a bootable CD??

[ragtop]

Most operating systems and OEM recovery disks now come on "bootable" CD's. I was wondering if its possible to burn your own bootable CD - ie: something that is equivalent to a Windows 98 startup floppy.

I have always found boot floppies to be very unreliable - just this weekend I spent a bunch of time tracking down a problem that turned out to be two bad startup discs. Seems like a CD would be much more reliable.

Anyone know how to do this??

[Nighthawk]

I know Nero can, you have to specify the files to use and maybe make a boot image (don't have it open in front of me)

[Fingers]

I never did it, but I thought I might need this someday so here's another SysOpt thread from my "favorites" folder. http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif

Bootable CD's (http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/Forum1/HTML/007626.html)

[ragtop]

Thanks Fingers. After reading through the thread you linked, I decided to experiment with my EZ CD Creater. It was actually much simpler than some of the explanations given. I just changed data settings to ISO9660, checked the box for "bootable" and hit OK. It asks you to insert a bootable floppy - I put in a WIN98 startup disk and it copied the data to the CD.

I didn't run all the functions, but the CD boots and appears to function exactly like a WIN 98 startup disk would. (creates the "RAMDRIVE", etc). The wierd thing is that the CD drive now functions as the A drive and the E drive. The A directory contains all the files that the normal WIN 98 startup disk has, and the E drive has any other files that exist on the CD.

This is pretty cool - I might not even bother using floppy drives any more, since the only time I use them is for boot floppies.

[Variable]

Hey man that sound cool...
it means you could burn your win9x installation files and a bootable floppy on one cd and do a reinstall with the bootable CD no floppy needed.

[Variable]

BTW do you need cd drivers on your bootable cd or not for the cd drive to work ( mean those files that were NOT on the floppy)