Re: (OT) Boot CD's [was Useful Utility (OT)]

[Harry Binswanger hb@xxxxxxxx]

Junja,

Thanks for the clear explanation. I do have a few problems with Xy's
startup.int, probably because it's looking for C:\Xy4 stuff rather than
R:\Xy4. But since it *can* read C:\Xy4, even though it's NTFS, I'm not
clear why this doesn't work. Oh, well.


--Harry



> Glad you've got a solution, Harry.
>
> I'm very far from expert on boot cd's but the principle
> of an .ISO image is that one images a whole
> bootable disk or partition. That's to say one creates a
> file whose contents are a disk (not simply a bunch of
> files) then burns that to a cd. Which, when
> booted, emulates the disk whose contents it
> contains.
>
> In many cases, the default disk after
> booting the image is A: - just as if you'd booted
> from a real floppy, not an imaged floppy. Whether
> the real hard disk is readable and writable, or has
> the same letter, is another kettle of fish.
>
> I've got a bootable cd I created after imaging a
> whole bootable hard disk partition - whose size I
> had to keep down to 640 Mb or so - to fit into a
> cd.
>
> Anyone with a floppy or an old unused hard disk
> can create a bootable cd. The steps are:
>
> 1. set the real bootable disk/partition up the way you
> want it
>
> 2. test it by booting from it and running the
> programs on it
>
> 3. reboot normally and tell your burner software
> to create an .iso image of it - i.e. to create a
> file on your ordinary hard disk containing the
> entire contents of the disk/partition - boot
> sector, fat, directory, files, empty space and
> all.
>
> 4. now tell your burner software to burn this .iso
> image file to a cd. This is always a specific
> .iso option in the menus - so the burner software
> knows it's creating a disk image not merely
> copying a bunch of files.
>
> An .iso image which one downloads is analogous.
> All it needs is step 4 (of course if you've downloaded
> it as a .zip file, it's necessary to unzip it first - to
> yield the .iso file.)
>
> It goes without saying that getting programs
> running on a synthetic image of this sort are
> similar to the ones met in getting xy running from
> thumb drives - references to files used/called
> should be designed the way Robert's & Carl's
> portable.int version of startup.int is, without
> hard-coding disk names like "c:". (See, I
> believe,
> http://users.datarealm.com/ammaze/xfer/portable.zip)
> Junja
>
> P.S. Nero burner software, just to be awkward, uses
> .nrg not .iso as extension for image files it
> creates. I've found its boot cds less reliable than
> the ones created by the (free) DeepBurner. Not
> to speak of its interface ..



Harry Binswanger
hb@xxxxxxxx