Making a CDR bootable from DOS - how?

Hi,
I'm trying to create a bootable CD-ROM, usually I tell my Adaptec CD creation software that I want a bootable CD and it says 'stick the bootable floppy in drive A & Click Ok' and then it reads the floppy disk in and adds 2 files (bootimg.bin and bootcat.bin) to the root of the CD image which makes it bootable.

However, my software for some reason does not like the current bootable floppy I have - it reports some kind of read error when it tries to add it to the CD image I'm making - I know the floppy disk is good as I've tested the floppy boots correctly in 3 different machines.

Now, I have some questions to do with this.

What is in the bootcat.bin file? - it looks like binary information of some kind.

I can see that bootimg.bin appears to contain the image of the floppy disk (more or less). But when I replaced the bootimg.bin file I had previously made with other bootable CD's with a copy of my floppy produced by raread (I left bootcat.bin as it was) the CD wouldn't boot on my system - I got a boot error like it was a non-bootable floppy disk image - which I know its not.

So, is there some standard somehwere that defines how to make a CDR bootable?
And if so, are there any tools that let me create my own boot images from my own floppy disks? Without having to rely on the Adaptec software to do it for me?
[strikes me that being able to make boot image larger than 1.44MB would be useful and not having to make a floppy disk up firts would be a time saver too].

I'm running Windows 2000 and the floppy boot disk is a DOS boot disk (which works fine).

I've actually had the same issue with Adaptec. I've moved over to Nero Burning Rom and I've been able to make all sorts of boot disks for DOS, Windows, and Linux. You can download a free trial from http://www.ahead.de and it should be able to do exactly what you want to do.

Good luck

The standard is ElTorito. I don't know where or if you can find a copy of it for free. It's probably over your head anyway. (That's not intended as a dig; I'm sure it's over mine, too.) Generally, though, the way it works is to emulate a bootable floppy or hard drive. In fact, IIRC, if that boots into DOS, you'll se it as drive A:. I do know that you can use 2.88MB images, if 1.44MB isn't enough, and I'm 98% positive that you can use arbitrarily sized images as well.

I never do this sort of thing under DOS/Windows. I use a program under Unix called mkisofs that deals with all of this sort of thing for me. It's possible that someone has ported it to DOS/Windows, as all it really does is create the ISO9660 image. You then have to burn it with a different program. Most Windows burners will do this without a hitch.

don't know, never done it, but these links might help (leeched from bootdisk.com)

http://www.nu2.nu/bootcd/
http://www.cdpage.com/Compact_Disc_Variations/bootablecdarticle.htm
http://www.bootdisk.com/txtfiles/ron.txt
http://www.ozemail.com.au/~rossstew/drs/sec2.html#bk21
http://www.goldentimes.net/bootcd01.htm

and I'm 98% positive that you can use arbitrarily sized images as well.

Very true. With Nero I have created boot images upwards of 300 megs when playing with "Windows on a Disc" type structures, and while doing my own install/recovery discs.

Apparently the option to use arbitary sized boot images on a CD isn't very well supported. It's done by using the hard disk emulation option instead of floppy. It's not used much so there are quite a few buggy BIOSs out there which can't boot them. This was a few years ago now so newer machines may be better.

- Trevor

Again, true. However, I only had one machine that couldn't boot the disc(s)... until I updated the BIOS.

I have (as luck would have it) just created a boot CDRW which does this in Nero without any probs. I also just found a prog NTFS DOS from Sysinternals which lets me read NTFS partitions. You can buy the full R/W version if you like. At least I can get my data back if a win2k boot goes bad.

How do you make larger boot images in Nero?

There are many ways to do it. I used Partition Magic to create a drive to work on as a test-bed. Then used WinImage to create an image of that drive. Finally, I just set that image as the boot image in Nero.

Thanks for reminding me about Nero.

I downloaded a trial version of Nero and used that - it works well with my Sony CD/RW drive in my Dell PC on Windows 2000.

the UI is a little quirky in places - no toolbar button to Burn the CD for instance, but once I'd found the right option on the File menu I could finally burn my creation which worked flawlessly.

I could swear I remember a toolbar button with a CD and a flame pictured on it. (Burn. Hah!) Maybe I'm wrong, though.

There should be toolbar button unless they've changed it recently - I've got 5.5.6.4

See attachment...

/Michael