Bootable CD

[Georg Potthast]

I would like to make a CD which boots DOS and starts a Powerbasic application.

How can this be done and what tools do I need?

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[Mark Baker]

Originally posted by Georg Potthast:
I would like to make a CD which boots DOS and starts a Powerbasic application.

How can this be done and what tools do I need?

Georg,

This can be achieved with Nero Burining Software.
It makes a Bootable CD from a floppy image, so just make yourself
a DOS system disk, sort out the config.sys and autoexec.bat and put
your pb dos program on the floppy disk.

Dont forget to point the last line of autoexec.bat to look something like this

\whereever\mypbdosprogram.exe

If you need help with the config.sys and autoexec just let us know

Hope this helps you out, by the way I believe Nero from v4 upwards
will make you a bootable CD, I currently use v6

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Regards

Mark Baker

[Georg Potthast]

Thank you very much Mark, I was not aware of this. I will give it a try.

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[Criss French]

hi greg, check out http://www.powerbasic.com/support/pb...read.php?t=896

it is a prior post of mine with some detailed info, example files, and a freshly fixed
link to a .zip file with many handy bits of stuff to make easy work of the job.

the most important thing to understand is that a bootable cd boots from a pretend floppy
drive (a:, the real a: becomes b: ), the contents being read from an image file stored at the
beginning of the cd by the burning program. that boot floppy image has to mount the cd
with a driver (such as oakcd.sys) and a file system (always mscdex.exe) in order to access
rest of the cd, which then gets its own drive letter. the boot floppy image is always still
seen directly as a:.

so unless you can fit your whole works on a single floppy, you will want your boot floppy
image to mount the rest of the cd properly and store your program/data there.

good luck.

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what can go wrong will go wrong.
anything can go wrong.
what hasn't?!?!

[this message has been edited by criss french (edited march 29, 2004).]

[Mark Baker]

Originally posted by Criss French:

So unless you can fit your whole works on a single floppy, you will want your boot floppy
image to mount the rest of the CD properly and store your program/data there.

Surely that is the Beauty of PB ?

As well with newer machines there are many
options for booting in the BIOS, floppy, cd, LS120 and ZIP (plus the new
corporate spec dells shipping boot initially from USB with NO FLOPPY drive shipped)



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Regards

Mark Baker

[Georg Potthast]

Chris,

thank you for your information which is very interesting.

However, I could fit all my programs on a 1.44 floppy. Then I used a new version of Nero to copy that floppy to a bootable CD-ROM and it worked fine.

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