is this possible?

[spanky]

i want to make a bootable cd. but the catch is, instead of making a solely win98 bootable cd, or a linux boot cd, is there a way i can make a boot menu (or of like lilo) to choose whether i want to boot to dos or linux? it would be sweet if i could. anyone got any ideas? any feedback is welcome. thanx!

 

[flood]

make a floppy disk that has the boot loader and cd drivers for each os
use that as the boot image and put all other files on the rest of the cd

 

[spanky]

<< make a floppy disk that has the boot loader and cd drivers for each os
use that as the boot image and put all other files on the rest of the cd >>




flood5: wow, thats a great plan! thanx time for some google searchin'....

 

[CTho9305]

That would definately be interesting... a single boot disk that can rescue multiple systems. Oh, and just a note: when you boot from a cd, as far as I know, the virtual "A:" can be no bigger than a big floppy, or 2 meg. That might make this interesting to try!!

 

[HypNoTic]

The max BOOT_IMAGE size is 1.44meg since all the burning programs available right now only allow that.

I did scrap about 20 CD when we tried to burn a CD with a kickstart install script in Redhat, so no floppy would be required to install a clean and secure IDS... it finally worked!

Maybe you can ckeck the structure from a NortonGhost/DriveImage/PartitionMagic boot disk since its able to read a lot of filesystem. It might help

 

[CTho9305]

nypnotic - i'm pretty sure you can use up to 2 meg, but if you know for a fact, thats good to hear (or bad, since its less space )

 

[flood]

<< nypnotic - i'm pretty sure you can use up to 2 meg, but if you know for a fact, thats good to hear (or bad, since its less space ) >>



ive tried many times but failed to make a boot image bigger than the size of a floppy disk :-[
good thing is that all yuou ned on there is the boot loader and a cd driver... load that up and you can read the rest of the stuff on teh cd

 

[HypNoTic]

Correction, you can actually use bigger boot images than 1.44 BUT its must be exactly the bood byte count for the emulation. I was never able to complete an bootable CD with "no emulation" or "hard disk emulation"... only with floppy, and i dont know why ?!

just validated that with the latest Nero 5.5.4.0 and it give you the choice of
- no emulation
- flopppy 1.20
- floppy 1.44
- floppy 2.88
- hard disk

 

[CTho9305]

ah, the floppy 2.88 is what i was referring to. The issue is gettinga 2.88 floppy image. never knew you could make a cd without emulation!

 

[viguru]

All you have to do is make a virtual drive and then use it to access the rest of the information on the rest of the cd. So, you can kinda get around the size limit.