Bart's way to create bootable CD-Roms (for Windows/Dos)

Beware of... Bart's PE Builder... Version 0.48 Created: May 10, 2000 Last updated: Jun 6, 2005

Welcome to one of world's best pages about creating bootable CD-Roms for PC! Introduction
...Bart's way of creating bootable CDs is not just another way, it is "THE SOLUTION" for your company... You (the technical guy) can create and prepare the structure for bootable installation, diagnostics or other CDs. And anybody in your company (without any knowledge about CD burning) can create and maintain these CDs by adding or changing files when needed. He just has to start a batchfile and select "Build & burn" to create a CD. From Sep 5, 2002 sections will be added to this page that use BCD (build CD) instead of cdrpack 1.3. Why use BCD? Cdrpack 1.x is single user/single computer by design. BCD has multi-user/multi-computer support, you can put BCD on your fileserver and run it from any workstation, no need to install any files on the workstation.

Requirements for building the examples

This is what you need: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. PC running Windows NT 4.0 SP4+, Windows 2000 or Windows XP. SCSI or ATAPI based CD-recorder or rewriter. ASPI manager (see also: Bart's page about ASPI). 1 recordable (CDR) or rewritable (CDRW) CD, at first try, use a rewritable if you can. To test if the completed CD works, you'll need a PC capable of booting CD-Roms. Some basic skills for copying, unpacking and editing some files.

Bootable Dos CD-Rom (single boot image) [updated! nov 4, 2002]

This will create a bootable CD-Rom using one boot image. The boot image is a sector by sector image taken from a bootable floppy. When a PC boots from floppy this is normally done from the first floppy drive, known as drive number 0 or as drive A:. So, to let the CD-Rom boot there must be some mechanism that emulates a floppy drive (drive number 0). Using this method your PC BIOS provides the emulation for you. If you are unsure or confused by the information on this page then this example is probably what you are looking for. This example will use the CD-Rom boot disk. The steps to create are: 1. If you haven't already installed BCD, please do so now. BCD installation instructions: Download BCD full package v1.1.1 (523KB). Or update from previous version: BCD update package (v1.1.0-v1.1.1) (5KB). When updating from previous versions, just extract the package over the previous version, overwrite any existing files. The bcd.cfg file will not get overwritten! Unpack the BCD package to some folder for example d:\bcd. If you want to be able to run it from a server you should unpack it to a share from where your workstations can run it. You will need to map a drive letter to that share and run bcd using that drive letter. Make sure you also unpack the subdirectories! Download wnaspi32.dll and copy it into BCD's d:\bcd\bin directory. I have asked Ahead Software AG if I could distribute their aspi manager with my BCD package but they said: "...due to our licence agreement you could only let your users download it freely from our web site...". 2. If you haven't already installed BFD, please do so now. BFD installation instructions: Please download: BFD full package v1.0.7 (1.45MB). Or update from previous versions: BFD update package (v1.0.x-v1.0.7) (410KB). When updating from previous versions, just extract the package over the previous version, overwrite any existing files. The bfd.cfg file will not get overwritten! Unpack BFD in the same directory as BCD, for example d:\bcd. If you have already unpacked BCD, then some files from BFD will overlap with files from BCD, like the nu2lic.txt and the bchoice.exe. This is no problem, just skip or

overwrite them. Make sure you also unpack the subdirectories! 3. Download cdromsi.zip (updated Nov 4, 2002) (1KB) and unpack it into the same folder as where you have installed BCD/BFD. 4. Now you can customize things like: Adding programs and files to "cds\cdromsi\files\" folder. These will appear in the root of your CD-Rom filesystem. Change the file "cds\cdromsi\files\autorun.bat" you can add any commands you want, like starting some application that is located on the CD-Rom. 5. When you're done customizing, you open a command prompt, change to the BCD folder and run "bcd cdromsi" to build your ISO image and burn it to your CD writer (if you have one). Wasn't that simple or what?!?