How to make a MS-DOS bootable CD
 

Hi all:

I have a Win XP PIII with a non working diskette drive and I want to boot right into MS-DOS as some games doesn`t work in XP or 7 and I don`t trust in DosBox with such slow computer. So the best way I thought to do it, is with a CD because the drive is working OK. So the question is how I do a bootable MS-DOS CD?

Thanks in advance

Well... The medium is not really important as long as your BIOS (or whatever is responsible at booting to read the first device) read from your CD-Rom at startup. Considering this, burning the exact same content than a normal boot-disk on a CD should give you what you want.

The hard part is being able to get access to those files. If your floppy drive don't work anymore then you of course cannot retrieve them from the floppy boot disk. Normally it would be a simple matter of reformatting a floppy using the /s tag but I'm not sure you can actually do that in XP...

http://www.answersthatwork.com/Downr..._downloads.htm
Scroll down a bit.

But you better get that floppy drive working.
There are a lot of problems you will have booting dos from a CD.
Whilst it's pretty easy to set up a boot menu using a floppy (smartdrive or not / memory settings -(EMS or not .....)- whatever whatnots etcetera) hard to do from CD. If your FAT is FAT32 you'll need Freedos or MsDos retrieved from Win98(ME) bootdisk to access your HD (otherwise you can't save, sucks of course)

So: floppy or better: setup a dualboot XP-MsDos.

BTW, XP on a P3? W98SE or even ME would run much better on that.

I know, but I´ve tweaked all the services turned it in a bare bones PC and is fast :)

Even then you're better of with W98SE.

Or in fact on a P3 I would highly advise W2Ksp4 with the W2Ksp4 rollup that adds XP program comp/functionality to W2Ksp4.
Look up UR1-UR1v2 to know more about it.


.... just saying.

XP is clearly the most stable platform I have ever used. I'm still using SP1 and it's just as stable as it ever been. For this alone I'd recommend using XP.

In the end it is all about processing power. You can have a P3 which match the P4 I have in term of power...

Nope, you can't.
Even if you could match the P4's MHz on the P3 (heat man, heat!!!) a P3's architecture/instruction set is too limited compared to a P4.

*And I even don't wanna mention the pipelines, registers, cache, chipsets .... etcetera etcetera blah blah......

I said: I don't wanna mention them, or a zillion other specs.