\"Real\" windows boot CD

[Anonymous]

Reg Path is the problem!!!!  The instructions as written do not work. I don\'t know what the patch would be.  There are \"hard\" and \"soft\" path statements in the Windoze\'s Registry.  Soft path = %WINDIR%.  Setting the environment does not over-ride this varialble.  I have worked on this project for several months using less steps to reach the burn cd step.  If anyone has a way of redirecting the soft registry path the program should work.

[Anonymous]

Yes u can do a real boot cd as Microsoft Original Windows® CD\'s and use it smoothly all u need is a nice program called isobuster it\'s so small about 1 MB but it will do it u first insert any original boot cd in the cd rom then run the magical prog it will reads the cd and u will find that it makes it in two tracks the iso mode and the boot mode u should use the boot mode and click a right click on it and click on extract word it will create a file called boot.ima or something like this and then change the ext of the file to boot.img u sould take this file and open the Nero program and choose close wizard then choose boot cd and click on the image button and specify the file location then press open but be ware to disable the expert mode option then press on new and begin putting your files to the cd then when u r finished click on burn   that\'s alll http://images.thetechguide.com/forum/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.gif\' class=\'bbc_emoticon\' alt=\'\' />

[Anonymous]

This refers to the German Instructions at  http://home.arcor.de/br103/windoof/boot-cd.htm there is no way this can work based on the limited path switching described in the instructions. I want to Run Windows 9x from a RAM DRIVE and A CD + RAM Drive Configuration. Any suggestions?

[Anonymous]

I tried this several times. The first time it didn\'t work, I don\'t remeber why. After a bit of tweaking in the autoexec.bat (there was something that prevented my Afreey 50x cdrom from working fine) it worked very well. However I added some stuff. For example I put many things in the RAMDisk, like the Temporary Internet Files folder, so that Internet surfing would work, the folder where Outlook Express stores incoming messages, I fixed something that was not working correctly, and I ended up with a very useful thing. So even when my hard disk broke I could use my pc.
However after burning I tried booting and my modem was in the device manager, but the \"Create new connection\" didn\'t detect it :-(
However it was much time ago, and I don\'t exactly remember what I changed to get it working, nor all the functions I added (there were many that would not be possible strictly following the instructions on that page).

[Leroy]

I try to make the cd but i can´t install in the drive x:
if any can helpme

sendme a mail

mike_leroy23Email Removed

Thanks

Leroy

Note: sorry for my english

[Anonymous]

have read a lot of posts here on making a windows boot CD, but unless I am misreading, they are all discussing how to make Bootable INSTALL CDs.
My problem is that I want to make a true windows boot CD

[Lycoris User]

Just to update everyone....after three attempts, I managed to get my windows \"live cd\" working great.

I tried following the c\'t instructions exactly, but there were a few discrepancies which led to failures....examples are the amount of ramdisk needs to be higher, no spaces in the \"Paths\".....you also need to get the correct dos driver for your cdrom, as well as give it the right name (ie mscd001).....you also need to go through every app that you install to make sure that when closing the app, it does not need write access to the disk (ie photoshop, dreamweaver, winzip, winamp, winmx.....). FYI, i used win95b which was easier to do than trying win98.....I\'m not complaining though, at least I can run win apps in my office which has gone totally linux.

My next target is to try and create a true win live cd which can work flawlessly on all comps......

cheers!

[Anonymous]

Winternals ERD commander 2002
boots to a gui from cd allows tco/ip access to network, also allows running of third party apps ( non winternals)
You can edit registry, change admin pw an more.

[Anonymous]

What everybody is looking for here is called Windows PE (Preinstallation Environment). It is available as an OEM tool. What it does is boot to a very basic, stripped-down version of Windows XP. You get to see the XP desktop background, but no Start button, Taskbar or Desktop Icons. What you do get, however, is a command prompt window, with the ability to do lots of cool stuff. You can look at NTFS drives and copy files to and from the drives, fdisk and format partitions, run programs, etc. You can\'t run Explorer, but I did copy Winfile from an NT4 box and was able to run it just fine. I can\'t believe the word hasn\'t gotten out about this yet, it\'s got to be the best utility I\'ve seen.

Good luck getting your hands on it though. Apparently only OEM\'s and volume licensed customers can get it.

[Tracky110XP]

I\'ve worked with WinPE and ERD commander.

as soon as i worked with ERD commander the Win PE hit the trash, everything you can do in winPE can be done in ERD commander Plus about 5 times more functionality and usefulness.

I\'ve looked through my information on WinPE and found a little training thing on it, the training on WinPE will be attached to the log.

for more information on the ERD commander please visit: http://www.winternals.com/products/repaira...mmander2002.asp

Now i know that most of you that are reading this are not going to spend this much money for a program, so if you were to want this software i would sugest that you search for \"Administrator\'s Pak\"not ERD commander 2002.

[emulator]

Dear David and/or anyone else who got this working...Did you ever get the Windows boot cd to working? I\'ve been trying, and can\'t seem to get things to working. When I try to boot from the newly-burned CD, the system tells me that it cannot find command.com, and that\'s as far as it gets. I\'ve followed the instructions in the tutorial listed in this thread on changing the files on the boot floppy that my burner software uses to create the boot cd, but it\'s still not working. I\'m including my \"w\" directory as well as the autoexec.bat, config.sys, io.sys, and msdos.sys files that I\'ve copied to the boot floppy listed below. Can you help me on this?Marc Hoffman

[TheQuietAchiver]

*** This Works  ***

Hi the way i did up my cdrom was by installing windows 98se in drive c: then setting it up the way i wanted it to run, under 700mb to fit on a 700mb cd, from there i clicked on the Start button and selected programs, acessories, system tools, then clicked on system information, from there i clicked on tools in the menu and selected system configuration utility and unclicked the startup group and restarted the computer.

From there i opened up explorer and selected to show all files and hidden files, and selected drive C: from there i made a new directory called cdrom and copied the contents of the whole C: drive into that directory. then double clicked on that directory and double clicked on command.com to open up the dos prompt in that directory. from there i typed in attrib -r -s -h *.* /s , to change the attribtes.

Then i copied it all onto a cdrom with nero as a bootable cdrom, with the floppy disk built like this.

              **** Autoexec.bat ****
mscdex /d:cd001 /l:c /m:12
set COMSPEC=c:command.com
set tmp=c:
set temp=c:
SET PATH=%PATH%;c:;c:windows;c:windowscommand;c:windowssystem
c:
cd c:windows
win

                          *** Config.sys ***
files=20
buffers=20
devicehigh=a:himem.sys
devicehigh=a:dblbuff.sys
devicehigh=a:setver.exe
devicehigh=a:Ifshlp.sys
devicehigh=a:oakcdrom.sys /d:cd001
dos=high
dos=umb
lastdrive z

Last of all i copied the io.sys and msdos.sys to the floppy disk drive plus the other files mentioned in the autoexec.bat and config.sys. Hope This Helps,,Have Fun
                               
                      Trouble shooting  
I decided to leave out the ramdisk with this one, and it ran good as well but it wont let you change much.

if you have troubles and want to change a few settings on yours then include the xmsdsk ramdriver, and copy the registry into memory and modify msdos.sys to point to where the registry will be stored.

[Anonymous]

Aaaaah, good job, one quick question though, maybe a problem, maybe not, but your version does not run from cd, the only advantage is that you have win98 installation on cd, but your configuration actually runs off hard drive and your cdrom is basically the same as a boot disk...this is shown by these lines here:

**** Autoexec.bat ****
mscdex /d:cd001 /l:c /m:12
set COMSPEC=c:command.com
set tmp=c:
set temp=c:
SET PATH=%PATH%;c:;c:windows;c:windowscommand;c:windowssystem
c:
cd c:windows
win

maybe the c: is just a mistake but normally c is your hard drive and considering that with mscdex you set your cdrom as d: I am thinking that it is just a boot floppy cd, though, if you did edit autoexec.bat and changed \"c:...\" to \"d:...\" then I would love to try your way since it seems a load easier.  That would also explain how you were able to do this without a ramdrive.

[TheQuietAchiver]

Ps: I forgot to mention last time that i had to disable virtual memory first before i could copy the complete contents of drive c: to the directory called cdrom.

ThankYou,

 Yes i setup Windows on my harddrive first, then i copied it to cdrom including command.com, and removed the hardrive out and ran it all from cdrom using that configuration on mine, im using it now networked to my brothers computer.

 I have it setup so it uses all the files on the cdrom without a ramdisk and have tried all other types as well, i found that windows 95 complains about not being able to write to the registry, so i went to windows 98SE and it works good as long as nothing gets changed on the computer, and nothing gets loaded up in your start menu on bootup, or registry.

There is a really good site that i found at http://www.windrv.com and they have something very interesting on there site for creating up ramdisks for windows, i am really looking forward to seeing there next demo version as well.

Hope this helped.

[Anonymous]

I do every  that you say
but say error when tray to boot in C:windowscommand.com
file damaged

Meaby something wrong in the paths

or for what is the error

Thaks

[TheQuietAchiver]

Hi there, i think you might of made a mistake typing in the autoexec.bat file when you were typing it in, because i never said to use c:windowscommand.com in the instructions before, but you might of typed in the path incorrectly or there is a problem somewhere there i think, but keep trying you will get there.

[Anonymous]

Hi there,

I\'ve been following your discussion about Bootable Windows CD from the beginning. I too have the write-up from the http://www.heise.de/ct/english/99/11/206/  and with the tips from your discussion, I was able to make a \'Real Bootable Windows CD\' on the first try. I suggest you follow the instruction in the above write-up exactly and make a bootable floppy with the modified IO.SYS, MSDOS.SYS, AUTOEXEC.BAT, CONFIG.SYS.  First try booting with this floppy and see if anything is wrong. The only problem I faced was in the device driver for my CD Rom. But I solved it. My config.sys and autoexec.bat looks like this:

config.sys
=======
DEVICEHIGH=a:himem.sys
DEVICEHIGH=a:ifshlp.sys
DEVICEHIGH=a:dblbuff.sys
DEVICEHIGH=a:setver.exe
devicehigh=oakcdrom.sys /D:mscd001
devicehigh=aspicd.sys /D:mscd001

autoexec.bat
==========
LH a:MSCDEX.EXE /D:mscd001 /L:X /M:50
a:xmsdsk 4000 w: /y
copy c:command.com w:
SET COMSPEC=w:command.com
a:xcopy X:ramdisk*.* w: /s
path w:;x:windows;X:windowscommand;x:windowssystem
x:

If anybody is interested I am thinking of making a step-by-step instruction. Basically the same as the German one but more to the bone.

Hope this will help.


Thanks

Iyer

[Anonymous]

after following all the tips & instructions here about making a windows boot cd, i was able to make it working now. at first i had problem loading widows having this error message: \"insuficient memory\" i was able to fix this by using this command switch for a:xmsdsk.exe 4000 /y /t (/t tells the computer to load the driver at the top of XMS memory) -- hope this helps...

i still have one problem now, once you change the registry\'s SystemRoot to W:W the dialup networking does\'nt work anymore becuse it can\'t find the modem...

any idea on this? thanks

[mgsriramiyer]

Hi,

I too have the same problem. Though my network is up and running. My Modem is shown as installed in Device Manager, but no dial-up networking. If you have around 64 MB RAM you can assign about 16 MB RAMDISK.

My problem now I can use this CD only in my computer. I need generic drivers for all my HW to make it run in all Computers. If someone has done this pls. share the info.

Thanks

Iyer

[TheQuietAchiver.]

Hi,

I was browsing the internet last night and came across this web site at http://www.qualystem.com/en/download.html

There is a program on that site called \"Qualystem Rescue for Windows 9X/ME\" that is a graphical way of creating windows bootable cdroms, that run windows all off the cdrom.

I tried it out and think it is great, its definately worth a look at.