I need a boot CD. (ASAP)

[Draggar]

I need a bootable CD to FFR an XP system.

FFR = FDisk - Format - Reinstall

I've searched but I can't seem to find any good ones (and for free). Suggestions?

I"m thinking of even pulling out my old Win98SE disc to see if I can get to it this way.

INcase you need to ask - boot sector virus.

Edit: Trying an Ubuntu boot disk to see if I can at least wipe out the drive

Edit: Linux partition and format then go to XP did not work...

[Guts3d]

This has had a few recommendations. But I bet the Win98 disk would suffice.

[Draggar]

I ended up using a Ubuntu server boot / installation disc to repartition the drive into smaller partitions then I finally found my XP rescue disc (from Dell) so I re-partitioned the drive back into one and now it's formatting - hopefully this'll work.

98SE only had boot floppies, CD-ROM drives were not bootable then.

[Ferrit]

You could have just used a Win98 boot floppy from bootdisk.com.
Then used any of a few dozen free lil programs for nukeing the disk like.
Wipe,Zap killdisk,which can also be found at bootdisk.com

[slgrieb]

Wow! A boot sector virus! It's been a long time since I ran into one of those. If you couldn't remove it conventionally, re-partitioning the disk was certainly the right way to go, because some of these (NYB comes to mind) are unaffected by just reformatting the disk. Still, it never hurts to have something like Ultimate Boot CD on hand or a disk you've made with Bart PE.

[Draggar]

Yep- the system is back up and running and a LOT faster (I never reinstalled Windows since I got the machine - about 2.5 years).

Now, I'm trying to get Linux on an older laptop to try it out. I'm downloading the latest version of Ubuntu. We'll see how that goes.

[NooNoo]

Err win98 booted from CD - and so did certain versions of ME...

Booting from CD has been around for more than 10 years!

[Draggar]

Odd, when I put the ME and 98SE disc in the drive, hit F12 for the boot menu, selected CD-Rom drive it said no bootable media was found (qand the discs are good).

Here's a (stupid) question - if I go to bootdisk.com (or whatever the site is) can I copyt an image of a 3.5 bootable floopy onto a CD? I think in theory it should work (and use CD-RW)

[Ferrit]

I dont believe that will work. I think the cd needs to be made bootable.
http://www.nu2.nu/bootcd/

[NooNoo]

Odd, when I put the ME and 98SE disc in the drive, hit F12 for the boot menu, selected CD-Rom drive it said no bootable media was found (qand the discs are good).

Here's a (stupid) question - if I go to bootdisk.com (or whatever the site is) can I copyt an image of a 3.5 bootable floopy onto a CD? I think in theory it should work (and use CD-RW)

only the OEM versions were bootable