On Mon, 25 Mar 2002 20:59:24 +0100 Mike <bcomber@freezer-burn.org> wrote:

Hi,

I'm trying to create a bootable CD for Windows. I know I need to create an image of a bootable floppy for this. No problem. I did a dd if=/dev/fd0 of=boot.img. That created the image of a bootable floppy.

Now I try to get it burned onto a CD. I've tried both Xcdroast and mkisofs from the command line. No luck. Most of the time it tells me that it can't find the boot.img file. But it is there, and it is the right size. I'm missing something quite simple but can't figure it out. The man page is of little or no help other than giving the -b eltorito_img_file command. no examples to be found on the page at all.

Does anyone know how to do this?

Hi, this is an old usenet post concerning this. If you want the easy way out, get mkcdrec from http://freshmeat.net. It will build a bootable cd for you , and add any utilities you want. ################################################# From: /usr/share/doc/cdrtools-mkisofs-1.11a06/README.eltorito t is simple then to make a bootable CD. First create a file, say "boot.img" which is an exact image of the boot floppu currently in use. There is at least one HOWTO on making bootable floppies. If you have a bootable floppy handy, you can make a boot image with the command dd if=/dev/fd0 of=boot.img bs=10k count=144 assuming the floppy is in the A: drive. Place this image somewhere in the hierarchy which will be the source for the iso9660 filesystem. It is a good idea to put all boot related files in their own directory ("boot/" under the root of the iso9660 fs, for example), but this is not necessary. One caveat - Your boot floppy MUST load any initial ramdisk via LILO, not the kernel ramdisk driver! This is because once the linux kernel starts up, the BIOS emulation of the CD as a floppy disk is circumvented and will fail miserably. LILO will load the initial ramdisk using BIOS disk calls, so the emulation works as designed. The "El Torito" specification requires a "boot catalog" to be created as ll. This is a 2048 byte file which is of no interest except it is required. My patches to mkisofs will cause it to automatically create the boot catalog. You must specify where the boot catalog will go in the iso9660 filesystem. Usually it is a good idea to put it the same place as the boot image, and a name like "boot.catalog" seems appropriate. So we have our boot image in the file "boot.image", and we are going to put it in the directory "boot/" under the root of the iso9660 filesystem. We will have the boot catalog go in the same directory with the name "boot.catalog". The command to create the iso9660 fs in the file bootcd.iso is then mkisofs -b boot/boot.img -c boot/boot.catalog -o bootcd.iso . The -b option specifies the boot image to be used (note the path is relative to the root of the iso9660 disc), and the -c option is for the boot catalog file. Now burn the CD and its ready to boot! -- $|=1;while(1){print pack("h*",'75861647f302d4560275f6272797f3');sleep(1); for(1..16){for(8,32,8,7){print chr($_);}select(undef,undef,undef,.05);}}