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Bootable DOS CD

antiquekid3

antiquekid3

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Nov 10, 2009
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Alabama
Hey guys,

I would like to figure out a way to make a custom MS-DOS bootable CD. I don't know how I can make the CD itself bootable. Don't a few particular files have to be at a certain spot on the disk? I want to be able to put certain programs and files on the CD. Can anyone help?

Kyle
 
It's been a while since I did it, but basically for a bootable CD, you have to provide a boot floppy. So, make a bootable DOS floppy with CD-ROM drivers and whatever else you want (a disk cache and mouse drivers would be good), test it to make sure it works, then when you go to burn your disc, check the "make bootable" option. Insert the floppy when prompted, and put the rest of DOS on the CD itself.

Like I said, it's been a long time (probably 6 years) since I last did it, but I used to do that a lot, and it worked nicely. 700 megs will hold a bunch of DOS software.
 
Why MS? It seems to me that's going to be difficult. To me it would make more sense to use FreeDOS. Since they have a bootable CD you know that it can be done.

Edit: I just say Dave's post. I didn't know MS could do that. Cool!
 
Ole Juul:

Grab an old OEM Nero disk, version 7 would be fine. Let Nero walk you through the process of creating a bootable CD. Basically, all you need is the DOS system files and then include what ever DOS items you wish. I have one that I made from a WIN98 emergency boot disk. It will provide all of the CD-ROM drivers that you need. I use this to install Xp. The CD boots to WIN98 and you get a command prompt. Suppose you wanted to install Xp. While the CD is in the boot process you will have a choice to either load CD-ROM driver or not. After you have FDISKed and formatted, you would reboot and and load SMARTDRV. BTW, this CD has the WIN98 front end along with a full volume of Xp. At the command prompt simply execute CD\I386 and then invoke WINNT and off you go. Why not just boot the whole install from Xp CD. I dunno, maybe your old box doesn't support CD boots. Besides, I always thought it was kind of kool to load Xp this way.
 
Actually I think bootdisk.com or googling around will get you a nice bootable floppy image using MS-DOS which yeah I've always made my personal tools off of (well in the old days at least before the tool started drinking diskspace). From there you can look at the drive letter the config.sys has set for the cdrom device/driver, mscdex is the command to mount it which you can throw into the autoexec.bat if it's not already there. Everything will be fine as long as it doesn't want to write to the drive. If you want that you can set up a ramdrive of various size (the Windows 98 boot floppy does this if you want to check out the configuration). Then yeah whatever cd burning software you have you tell it to make a bootable disk and point it either to your floppy or the floppy image file to use for the bootable media.

Normally I try to include the commands but it's beer thirty and I'm tired ;-) But thought I'd chime in on where to get an already made one for your fun. Other than that if you have a CDRW play with it on that so you can reburn it with multiple tries if you don't want to waste CDRs.

- John
 
Agent Orange, thanks for the info. I'm familiar with the win98 boot disk but I have no expertise with win98, or any other Windows software for that matter. I've heard of Nero, but I think it too is a Windows program. I guess I'm just out of my depth here. :) My DOS use is limited to MS 6.22 or earlier and there is no functional CD writing software that I know of there, although CDROAST (based on Golden Hawk's freeware parts) might work - it didn't for me. I wonder if any other DOS users here have had success with CDROAST. Using Windows functionality to write a bootable CD is very interesting though.

I do keep a huge archive of DOS utilities on a CD but I use K3B to write those. Still, it's really just a backup since I figured out networking which btw also works with serial ports on old floppy-only machines. It's a lot of fun to explore options though.

PS: The "Disk-at-once CDrom Recording Utilities" from Golden Hawk are freeware, but they are older and limited. The problem (at least for me) is that they only support very old writers which I've never even seen and certainly don't have.
 
I used to use DOS bootable CDs to image laptops with NT4wks (1998 ). The DOS image needs a CD-ROM driver access the remainder of the CD. I think the floppy image is presented as drive A by the BIOS, as said above it's been a long time though so that might not be accurate.
 
Agent Orange said:
Ole Juul:

Anyway you could score at least WIN98, and drop it on a partition somewhere? Sure would make life a lot easier with respect to file management. You might be able to get it for next to nothing off of eBay.

http://computers.shop.ebay.com/?_fr..._nkw=windows+98+operating+system&_sacat=58058
Click to expand...

Hehe, I've got several copies - but only as a collector's items. I don't run MS-Windows. :) Besides the learning curve is a bit steep for me at this time. However, I do appreciate the suggestion. :)

I an greatly puzzled by your statement about making file management easier. I run DOS 6.22 and that is about as good as it gets for file management IMO. I've been doing the command line since I got into computers and can handle my personal DOS system literally with my eyes closed. When it comes to writing CDs and other more sophisticated tasks, I find that BSD and Linux have more functionality that a human could learn in a lifetime.
 
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Old Juul:

What I meant by 'file management' was probably a bad analogy. If I wanted to burn a CD using DOS at this very moment, I wouldn't know where to start. I'm sure there's something out there that would let you do that. By the time recordable CD's showed up on the home front, Windows was pretty much established and Adaptec (now Roxio) was the defacto burning program. If you can manipulate DOS, you're 90% there as far WIN95 or WIN98 goes. But, I understand where you're coming from - its like what to do you prefer, a stick shift or an automatic.
 
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