Topic: Hard disk to Bootable CD
started by: handymark
Posted by handymark on Jan. 12 2006,12:17
This should be simple but has evaded me so far. I have a small hard drive that is basically a win98 startup disk that has more utilities than will fit on a floppy. if I put the hard drive into a machine it boots and all utilities are accessible. I've tried every way I can think of to turn this HD into a bin, iso, img file to add to the boot using either nero 5.5 or EZ Creator 6.1. I get the CD to start the boot process but end up with missing operating system. I can't seem to find a way to view for trial and error what file is tagged for boot in the image file. If I can turn this HD into an image that will work to create my bootable utility CD with UltraISO then the product will suit my purpose enough to buy it. I've already burnt about a dozen coasters. Please advise 
Posted by xoben on Jan. 13 2006,01:55
As Windows 98 will write to harddisk when it is booting up, there is no simple way to make a bootable CD from disk drive.
Posted by handymark on Jan. 14 2006,10:11
Maybe I didn't phrase my question clearly, or missed some point. I currently have made successful utility boot CDs using a win98 startup disk as the boot source using either nero 5.5 or EZ CD Creator 6.1. It loads all of the CDROM drivers and creates the ramdrive and allows me access to all of my utilities that I have in the non boot area of the CD. My problem is that the 1.44meg size limits what I can put on the boot floppy and in turn limits my ability to expand menu options and simplify the start sequence of the utilities. This is where I was hoping UltraISO could help. I just want to use a hard drive image in place of the floppy to increase the size of the bootable area. Can this not be done with UltraISO? Thanks,
Posted by xoben on Jan. 15 2006,01:17
You can do it this way:1) Download a sample 64MB harddisk image from < http://dw.ezbsys.net/nhdboot.zip >
2) Add your tools and modified autoexec.bat/config.sys to this image by WinImage
3) Start UltraISO, choose 'New'->'Bootable CD/DVD image' to create a bootable CD
A better choice is using EasyBoot, which can make multi-boot, menu-driven bootable CDs much easier.