Bootable CD From Floppies

**BOB IROC** · March 13th, 2004, 03:42 PM

Ok, I didnt know what forum topic to put this under so I using this one. I want to know the best way to make a bootable CD from mutliple floppies. Here is a brief Idea of what I am trying to do. In my job we use Norton Ghost and I have about 5 - 6 floppies I would like to put onto a bootable mini CD. Since those MINI CDs hold a little over 200MBS, I would like to consolidate my bootable floppies onto one CD and maybe add some other utilities such as diagnostics. Everything I want to put on this CD can boot by itself from a floppy or from another bootable CD. Since I am a Hardware guy, I am looking to you guys for some easy way to do this. I have made simple batch files before, but there are just that SIMPLE. I have also made bootable CDS from a boot floppy using Roxio 6, but that only seems to let you use on disk.

**NEPATEC** · March 13th, 2004, 09:19 PM

Originally Posted by BOB IROC

Ok, I didnt know what forum topic to put this under so I using this one. I want to know the best way to make a bootable CD from mutliple floppies. Here is a brief Idea of what I am trying to do. In my job we use Norton Ghost and I have about 5 - 6 floppies I would like to put onto a bootable mini CD. Since those MINI CDs hold a little over 200MBS, I would like to consolidate my bootable floppies onto one CD and maybe add some other utilities such as diagnostics. Everything I want to put on this CD can boot by itself from a floppy or from another bootable CD. Since I am a Hardware guy, I am looking to you guys for some easy way to do this. I have made simple batch files before, but there are just that SIMPLE. I have also made bootable CDS from a boot floppy using Roxio 6, but that only seems to let you use on disk.

This site has been paydirt for us:

http://www.nu2.nu/bootcd/

Another link that may come in handy (for nearly everyone who works on computers for a living) is:

http://www.heise.de/ct/Service/English.htm/99/11/206/

Using these two sites as a blueprint, we created bootable CDs for all our techs. These not only offer a means of clean-booting a box directly from the CD-ROM drive, but also retain the option of running Windows from the CD as well. This has come in very handy when doing data recovery . . . it prevents the customer's drive(s) from being written to (since Windows is running from the CD) and eliminates the need to pull any hard drives.

**techs** · March 14th, 2004, 08:35 AM

Maybe I don't understand the question but can't you just use your EZ cd creator to create a cd with the boot sector from your first floppy and then copy the contents of the floppys into the data area of the cd?

**BOB IROC** · July 21st, 2004, 10:40 AM

Originally Posted by techs

Maybe I don't understand the question but can't you just use your EZ cd creator to create a cd with the boot sector from your first floppy and then copy the contents of the floppys into the data area of the cd?

But if you have more than one disk it will take disk one and make it into a BIN image and it cannot point to disk two. Symantec gives no help on this that I can find.

**NooNoo** · July 21st, 2004, 11:11 AM

Are you wanting to have one cd with different types of boot? Like one cd can be a menu choice 9x startup diskette or from a 2k startup or dos 6.2?

**arch0nmyc0n** · July 21st, 2004, 01:18 PM

Sounds like your trying to do what I'm doing. I suggest not trying to have mutliple boot disks on one CD. The way I've done it is that I use whatever cd burning program to create a bootable CD with diskette that has just a few different CD-rom drivers and something like mscdex. I statically assign the cdrom to be z: and create a RAM drive (y

for any programs that need to be extracted into a "write" allowed area. I do this because then I'm not restricted to have a 1.44 image. I simply transfer whatever programs I need on the diskette to a directory on the CD that's not part of the boot image. I've done this and have a CD with all the current Hard Drive Diagnostic programs that I just select what type of hard drive (and in some cases the age of the drive) and it'll automatically extract the proper diag util to the RAM drive so it can run properly.

I use BOOT.SYS as a config file and autoexec.bat programming alternative. VERY GOOD, plus I just emailed him and he said I'm free to use it as long as I don't sell it. I use Quikmenu III for a graphical mouse driven interface.

I dunno if that's what you were thinking of, but I tried the multiple boot CD thing a while back and it wasn't quite what I'd hope. I found this way more robust in the ability to easily change it.

**BOB IROC** · July 21st, 2004, 01:33 PM

Originally Posted by NooNoo

Are you wanting to have one cd with different types of boot? Like one cd can be a menu choice 9x startup diskette or from a 2k startup or dos 6.2?

Basically what I am saying is that when I create a boot disk set using Norton Ghost Boot wizard, it makes it on two floppies. I want to take those floppies and make one boot CD that will run seemlessly and load right into the ghost program as if it was one big floppy disk. THe reason there is two floppies is because of the network card drivers that are on the disks. Eventually I would like to set up a boot menu and include this ghost information along with some diagnostics and utilities. I have read through that Bart Bootable CD thing, but that is more than I need at this point.

**NooNoo** · July 21st, 2004, 02:49 PM

So you want to have a range of ndis drivers for lots of different nics?

Do all the nic drivers and the boot files fit on one floppy - is the ghost.exe on the second floppy?

**cyberhh** · July 21st, 2004, 02:56 PM

I use CD Shell to do exactly what you are wanting to do.

You can use "Ultimate Boot CD" as a good place to start, as the owner encourages you to change it to suit your needs.

What you will want to do is use WinImage or some other floppy imager to get img or ima images of the floppies, then you create a menu system to access it all and burn the thing to a cd using the bootable bin file from cdmenu to boot the cd. Then you can select the boot "floppies' from the custom menu you created and go from there.

The nice thing about this is that you can create boot floppies that are as large as you want (650mb boot floppy is available).

You can boot a DOS/Windows or Linux environment from the same cd.

You can now put all your boot floppies and drivers on one cd along with service packs, updates and windows tools and have an excellent portable toolbox on a single cd.

**techs** · July 21st, 2004, 04:09 PM

Originally Posted by BOB IROC

Basically what I am saying is that when I create a boot disk set using Norton Ghost Boot wizard, it makes it on two floppies. I want to take those floppies and make one boot CD that will run seemlessly and load right into the ghost program as if it was one big floppy disk. THe reason there is two floppies is because of the network card drivers that are on the disks. Eventually I would like to set up a boot menu and include this ghost information along with some diagnostics and utilities. I have read through that Bart Bootable CD thing, but that is more than I need at this point.

I have one that I made using Ghost 2002 standard edition. It doesn't have the net drivers on it but it has cdrom drivers. It is 2.23 mb and I can send you a .iso image and you can use Winimage to view how it is set up.
The only drawback is if there is an error loading ghost or running it ghost tries to write the error log to the cd and since it can't it crashes.
Send me a pm.