I am no expert but 1. yes I think you can make a collection of files programs and your own kernel and create a bootable CD. 2. somebody said earlier in this thread they downloaded part of the ftp collection from the ftp site and made a bootable CD out of it. 3. mkisofs is being used to turn floppy disk images into bootable CD images. this is called el torito and it puts a limit on how large the image can be. it must conform to floppy size 1.44 2.88 or .722 I believe.

From: John Karns <jkarns@csd.net> To: Purple Shirt <purpleshirt@hotmail.com> CC: jvdl@sirius.com, suse-linux-e@suse.com Subject: Re: [SLE] bootable SuSE CD image Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2001 17:31:13 -0500 (COT)

On Wed, 28 Mar 2001, Purple Shirt said:

...

after all the messing with modules you end up with a new floppy boot image.

you then convert it to a CD one as described earlier in the thread by use of win pc or use linux box with something like this:

...

cd / mkisofs -b bootdisk -c boot.catalog -o boot.iso -r -L /temp/disk1/

(bootdisk must be located in disk1 directory; this will create /boot.iso; then burn it)

There is no special protocol then, or special command line argument to create the bootable CD? It would seem then, that you could just as well create a large image file with lots of utilities to make a rescue CD.

The reason I ask is that in the past I tried to copy the set of SuSE disks to have a backup, but CD 1 was not bootable. Thus I thought that there was some special technique to it.

---------------------------------------------------------------------- John Karns jkarns@csd.net

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