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About Boot Disks
Creating a bootable CD/DVD
Case 1: Boot disk from scratch + CD/DVD driver
Case 2: Win95 disk + CD/DVD driver
Case 3: Win98/ME disk + CD/DVD driver
QUICK SOLUTION: www.bootdisk.com
Have a look at a web site called WWW.BOOTDISK.COM. You can download disk images that will create all kinds of boot floppies. What you will download is a program called, for example, win98se.exe; when you run it, it creates a Windows 98SE boot floppy. Do not just copy win98se.exe to a floppy disk (a common error) - that will not make it bootable. You have to run the program. You can also use images of those disks to create bootable CDs or DVDs.
About boot floppies:
A bootable floppy disk is a very useful thing to have. You may need one if:
Windows 9x and ME are supposed to come with a boot floppy; NT and 2000 have programs on the CD which will create boot floppy sets. For XP, you must download a utility from Microsoft's web site to create the boot floppies. The XP Pro and XP Home editions have different boot floppies (go figure). There are three floppies for NT 4.0, four for 2000, and five or six for XP. The boot floppy sets are only used to install or repair those versions of Windows; they are not general-purpose boot disks. The CDs for NT, 2000, and XP are bootable, which is much a faster way to get the installation or repair going.
Little-Know Fact: Some Windows 98 CDs are bootable. Try it. At the time 98 was released, few computers were capable of booting from the CD; I presume that's why the fact was not widely advertised.
If you don't have a boot floppy, you can make one. Windows NT, 2000, and XP require more than one floppy to start the installation; if that's what you want to do, see Tips Part 14 and 15. If all you want to do is partition the hard disk(s), this boot floppy will work for any version of Windows, or even Linux/Unix; the OS may convert partitions to different file systems, but that has no effect on the size and number of partitions you created.
Case 1: Creating a bootable floppy disk from scratch
Click Start > Settings > Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs, and click the Startup Disk tab. Follow the instructions there (this part is not too complicated).
You will then have to copy your CD-ROM driver onto the boot floppy, and configure it:
1. You should have a floppy disk that came with the CD-ROM drive; look for a file on it with the extension .SYS - that is the CD-ROM driver. Copy it to your boot floppy. If you don't have a copy of your CD-ROM's driver, you can probably find it on the manufacturer's website.
Note: Many CD-ROM drivers work for makes and models other than the one they were specifically designed for. If you have an Acer CD-ROM, and find a copy of, say, a Panasonic CD-ROM driver, try it; it just might work. At worst you will get an error message.
2. Look for a file called MSCDEX.EXE in C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND. Copy it to your boot floppy.
3. There is a file on your boot disk called CONFIG.SYS. Open it with Notepad, or any plain text editor (not Word, or WordPerfect, etc.).
At the end of the file, add these two lines:
DEVICE=<name of your CD-ROM driver>.SYS /D:OEMCD001
LASTDRIVE=Z
Be sure to save CONFIG.SYS after making any changes.
4. There is another file on the boot disk called AUTOEXEC.BAT. Open it with Notepad, and add the following line at the end:
MSCDEX.EXE /D:OEMCD001 /L:D
The last item on the line (/L:D) is the drive letter of your CD-ROM; if your hard disk is blank, or if your CD-ROM is normally drive D:, just leave it. If your hard disk is not blank, and your CD-ROM is, for example, drive E:, you may have to change this to /L:E, or whatever letter your CD-ROM drive is.
OEMCD001 is simply the name of the CD-ROM device, and is basically arbitrary. You could name it "FREDDY", or almost anything you want, as long as the names are the same in CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT.
Be sure to save AUTOEXEC.BAT after making any changes.
Case 2: Your Windows 95 boot floppy does not activate your CD-ROM
You have two choices:
1. Create a boot disk from scratch, as described above.
2. Make changes to your Windows 95 boot disk, as described below.
This is probably no less complicated than creating a boot floppy from scratch, but...
1. Make the changes as described in the section above, Creating a bootable floppy disk from scratch: copy the CD-ROM driver and MSCDEX.EXE to the boot disk (it probably already has MSCDEX.EXE on it), and edit CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT accordingly.
2. There is a file on the Windows 95 boot floppy called DRVCOPY.INF; open it with Notepad. You will need to make several changes.
3. Look through DRVCOPY.INF for any instances of the text SAMPLE.SYS; replace SAMPLE with the name of your CD-ROM driver.
4. You will see a section that looks like this:
[RM.Auto.upd]
; OEM_Modify - Change the "D" in L:D to represent the default drive
; letter for your CD ROM.
; - The OEMCD001 parameter should agree with the
; config.sys parameter above.
; This line will be added to the user's AUTOEXEC.BAT
CmdAdd=MSCDEX.EXE,"/D:OEMCD001 /L:D"
In the example above, as in the section Creating a bootable floppy disk from scratch, step 4, it may be necessary to change /L:D to the drive letter of your CD-ROM. If so, remember you must change it in AUTOEXEC.BAT as well. That is, the drive letter specified must be the same in DRVCOPY.INF and AUTOEXEC.BAT. Also, the name of the CD-ROM device (OEMCD001) must be the same in CONFIG.SYS, AUTOEXEC.BAT and DRVCOPY.INF.
Case 3: Your Windows 98 or ME boot floppy does not activate your CD-ROM
Don't even try to fix this one. I wouldn't. See the section above, Creating a bootable floppy disk from scratch or try the quick solution.
Windows 98 and ME come with a boot floppy that is supposed to be able to kick-start just about any CD-ROM drive on the market. I have never seen it fail to do so.
Creating a bootable CD or DVD
I can't give you specific instructions here. How you do this depends on your burner and the software that you use to burn disks (which likely came with the drive). However, I can tell you that you will need a disk image to accomplish the task. You can get disk images off the Internet, or you can make your own.
Using a floppy disk image to make a bootable CD/DVD means that you will appear to be at the floppy disk A: prompt when it boots, with a command-line only interface.
See www.bootdisk.com, mentioned above, or try one of the "live" Linuxes - a complete workstation that runs off a bootable CD. Click here.
Bart's PE (Pre-installed Environment) is another option - you can make a Live CD version of Windows XP. It boots and runs entirely off the CD, just like Knoppix, above. Be warned, however: a) it will only work properly on the machine it was created with; b) it's not for the technologically timid - the documentation has very good step-by-step instructions, but it is complicated.
Bart's Homepage - click here.
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