How to burn a bootable CD

[jfchui]

My CDRW drive is sticky. It is not entirely un-usable. With the help of disk cleaning and a few retries it still works. It is not giving me real problem as most of my CD could be read this way. I do not want to buy a new one yet.

Now I have two copies of my Windows 2000 Installation disk. The original one that is bootable but all all its files could be read fully. If I use it during the installation process it will surely give me errors half way down.

I had already made a copy of this Win2k installation disk some time ago. I was using the Adaptec Easy CD Creator. However, I found I must have done something wrong when I was making the copy. It is not bootable and I believe it is because I did not use the CD copy function but had simply copied all the files. All the files could be read from this fresh copy without a problem(yes, without problems I am sure).

How can I make use of these two CDs to make a third one that is "perfect"? I know my CD burner is still doing its job perfectly if I select a reduced speed during burning (from my experience, all CDs created freshly by it are read in any drives without any problem).


Many many thanks.

[BipolarBill]

You will need Nero. You can use an eval copy.

http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=277

Take the opportunity to fold in SP4.

[jfchui]

Originally posted by BipolarBill
You will need Nero. You can use an eval copy.

http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=277

Take the opportunity to fold in SP4.

Thanks. Very helpful. It should help me to get a replacement CD. It appears we can throw service pack 3/4 into the installation CD.

Do you mind explain briefly what I'd missed out during the creating the CD copy? (why the CD I created is not bootable?). Do you mean Adaptec Easy CD Creator product couldn't create a bootable disk this while Nero is able to? I'd actually compared all the hidden/system files in their root directories. The original installation CD and mine appear to contain the same boot files.

Thanks.

[BipolarBill]

You can make a bootable CD with Easy CD, but you cannot copy the bootimage direrectly. Read that page I gave you to learn more about the boot image.