a question....

[gballard]

When I am reloading my computer...there is a little program I like to use called EFDisk. I use it to fdisk the MBR and then to fdisk all the drives. In my new machine I will not have a floppy drive and I am wondering if anyone would know where some documentation might be that would tell me how to make a bootable cd-rom that would be able to have and run this EFDisk off the cd-rom.

 

[IBraineater]

EFDISK!!!! thats a great program. try it...take your efdisk and put all of the contents onto a cd and boot from the cd and see what happens. in theory it should work.

 

[IBraineater]

lemme know if it works or not.

 

[gballard]

welll....ermm...how do i make the disc bootable?...i figgered i just put the files on the disk...but i am guessing i gotta make it bootable somehow

 

[grimman]

Using nero you should get an option to use a floppy as a boot-cd option... kind of.
Well. In short it creates a "floppy-sector" on the cd from which it boots. Nero should be able to copy a bootable floppy for you, which you then use for the floppy-sector.

Errrrr. Heh, not making much sense, am I? Just get nero and find the bootable cd-option. It's really quite easy.

 

[grimman]

Oh, and yes. The floppy-part can handle 2 MB or something... not that you need to bother with it anyway, but still. Just so you know. Other than that you just add content to the cd like any other cd you might burn.

 

[gballard]

well...i tried...I made a bootable floppy from within XP and had that floppy in the drive and fired up Nero and closed the wizard and went to CD-ROM (Boot). For the Source of the boot image data...."Bootable logical drive (must fit on the CD!) was automatically selected and it read A:\ 1 MB in the dropdown. I then chose New and copied my efdisk files to the left and then pressed the Burn button. For Action I told it to Write and Finalize CD. The Write Speed is 20x...the Write Method is Disc-at-Once and the Number of Copies is 1. I then pressed Write and the burn process began. It accessed the floppy drive and extracted the boot data I guess. The process finished and the disc ejected when it was done. I put the disc back in and it showed all the EFDisk files there on the cd. I then powered off my machine and rebooted and it came up to a A:\ but when I did a DIR it only showed the boot files...didn't show any of my EFDisk files...back to the drawing board I guess.

 

[gballard]

well...I finally got it to work...but I don't think its the way I really wanted it. I downloaded a MS DOS 6.22 boot disk builder from bootdisk.com and then extracted that to a floppy. I must be doing something wrong still...because...when the burn process is done it shows the EFDisk files on the disc...but when i go to another machine and boot off the cd and get to an A:\ prompt and type dir...all that shows up is the DOS boot files and stuff. So...I took the boot disk and copied the efdisk.exe to the boot disk and did the burn process again...it still showed the files on the disc from in windows as being one thing but different when I boot off the disc...but...efdisk.exe is there now and I can run it...so...I guess this is kinda what I wanted to accomplish....

 

[lieb39]

Also, for anyone reading this, and wants a easier way... www.bootdisk.com ... everything you will ever need for formatting/boot disks

-lieb39