How to create a bootable CD?

jcoyier · #1 August 31st, 2004, 06:31 PM

I am attempting to recover a PC I messed up using Partition Magic. Neither hard drive in the system will boot at this point although the partitions are still apparently on the drive including one containing Win2000 and one containing Win98SE. I know this because the Western Digital bootable CD that came with the last drive "sees" at least some operating system and does not allow me the menu choice to low-level format the drive. At this point, my only idea on how to proceed would be to download the latest WD utility file that contains a low level format program but that would require me knowing how to create a bootable CD since I do not have a floppy in this PC. The only two operating system CD's I have are Win98SE and Win2000 and as I recall, the first time this happened, I attempted to let Win2000 format the drive, it could not clean the BootMagic partition off the drive. I was, somehow, able to reach the "write zeroes" menu choice from the WD CD but this time cannot. Any advice would be appreciated. My knowledge on creating a bootable CD is minimal....I believe it would need to contain boot.ini, autoexec.bat and config.sys at the very least although I've no idea what each of these should look like or where to get them other than to go look at some on various PC's I've got access to.

**Murf** · #2 September 1st, 2004, 12:36 AM

Welcome to CTH

Have you tried booting from the CD? Set the BIOS to boot as first boot. Usually hitting the DEL key first screen (or whatever key the screen tells you to use) to get into SETUP.

Put the W2K CD in and it should boot, then you can try a repair.

Otherwise to make a bootable CD:

A excellent help page to make a Bootable CD

jcoyier · #3 September 1st, 2004, 01:14 AM

I've been to the Bootable CD website. It requires more knowledge than I possess. Getting the system to boot from a CD is easy, I'm able to do that through the BIOS menu. Things that I would need to know to create a boot cd include knowing what emulation to use, how and where to get a boot image file, whether to unzip all those folders and files Bart lists needed to make a bootable cd...I tried it maintaining the folder structure he had but it failed when I ran it. Thanks for the reply tho.

**Murf** · #4 September 1st, 2004, 11:14 PM

An easier way located HERE