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Need some help making a bootable CD

PostPosted: Wed Jul 14, 2004 2:32 pm
by BurninMan921
OK, Here's what I'd like to do: make a bootable CD that lets me pick what boot image I want.

The one's I'd like are DOS, WinXP install, Arconis Disk Director (think Partition Magic, but that runs w/o any OS), and SpinRite.

Now I have ISO CD images of all of the above; I've even slip-streamed SP1 into my XP install.

The tools I have available are UltraISO & CopyToDVD.

Now, if anyone can tell me how to do this with ISOLINUX that'd be great, because I can't figure it out. The one giving me the most trouble is Disk Director; the ISO on my HDD is 15MB, but the boot-image file is only 2K. How can I grab the entire bootable image?

MagicISO (UltraISO's twin, it would seem) has a "multi-boot" option, but it just boots up to a garbled screen :(

Re: Need some help making a bootable CD

PostPosted: Wed Jul 14, 2004 2:39 pm
by Shredder

PostPosted: Wed Jul 14, 2004 2:45 pm
by BurninMan921
That's what I've been trying, but I still can't get the stupid Disk Director too boot correctly...

EDIT: Ok, I've found my problem :)

But, I need something to rip the ENTIRE boot image from a disk now; barts bbie and UltraISO only grab the boot sector.

With the full boot image, then I can get DD working and rip my DOS boot image off of the CD, since I can't seem to find the image file now :evil:

And no, I don't have a floppy which makes nabbing the boot image somewhat hard...

PostPosted: Thu Jul 15, 2004 1:24 am
by BurninMan921
Holy f*** that was a pain in the a$$!!!

Finally got it to work. What a pain.

How?
First, the I used ISOLINUX to make my boot menus - which included my DOS boot disk, an NTFS-capable DOS boot disk, Spinrite, WinXP installer, and a password recovery boot disk. Fairly simple.

Now...Acronis Disk Director wasn't so simple. First, have it burn it's little bootable cd. Check.

Next, have UltraISO make an ISO of it - check.

Now, to get the boot image...spend several hours online digging trying to find out how to extract the ENTIRE boot image.

Stumble upon WinISO; download and try trial version. It extracts the correct boot image (about 15MB). Problem: it's in an odd-ball format (WinISO's own WBT boot info format).

Say f-it and slap it on the disk; ISOLINUX fails to load the image. Big surprise.

Finally, stumple across www.911cd.net's forums. Find out about CD Shell and BCDW.
Spend about 1/2hr messing with CDShell. Swear at computer.

Download BCDW program (20min+ for a < 500KB file; site is hosted on some obscure Russian server - luckily with an english translation) - tell myself it's the last f-ing thing I'm going to try.

See message saying to rename the ADD ISO file to .wbt, and load it with BCDW.

Experiment with BCDW, trying about 10+ minor variants of the ini files. No dice. Thank the powers that be that I have UltraISO and VMWare - no burning/rebooting 500 million times needed.

About to give up; copy actual WBT file to ISO, tweak INI files (again), try it.

About fall out of chair when it actually WORKS.

All this so I only need one CD to setup a pc. Sigh....

PostPosted: Thu Jul 15, 2004 8:01 am
by pranav81
Glad that you finally had it working. :)


::Pranav::