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

[junja junja@xxxxxxxx]

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 ..