How to make a bootable CD with DriveImage, Partition Magic and others - by B

Tools required:

W98/98SE Boot floppy;

IOPATCH; 

WinImage, HD-COPY or Disk Imager 95;

Burning s/w with bootable CD support.



 There are times you need to run a large DOS utility – or several of them – with your nose pressed on the outside of a cold, cold Windows installation.

Utilities often required at moments of stress are: DriveImage; Ghost; Partition Magic . . . you know the kinds of things.

To do this comfortably; you’ll need to make a bootable CD: this works by containing an image of a bootable floppy – so the first thing you’ll need is a known working bootable floppy with your IDE/SCSI [including SCSI-host] CDROM drivers on it. Check it.

If you can’t find a suitable CDROM driver, & if the generic drivers in the MS boot-floppies don’t work; use the CDRom God 5.5 utility to find one that does.

Even with a known working floppy, you’ll very likely have to apply IOPATCH to its IO.SYS file – this puts a pause into the boot process in which your CD-devices can flash their lights, reset & so on without the CD’s unavailability freaking out the configuration files being loaded from the floppy – they'll now just have to wait till the CD-device is ready.

Having done this; you now edit the autoexec.bat & config.sys files to prepare a DOS home for the utilities you’ll stick on the CDROM. – &, of course, the DriveImage or Ghost image-file you may choose to fill up the body of the CD with.

The example below is based on a standard W98/98SE boot-floppy & makes a spiffy blue-on-black extended DOS menu to give your utilities as extra boot choices.

These files will give you a nice blue on black start menu with three new entries for DriveImage, Ghost and PartitionMagic. Also your CD's drive letter will be X:\ just in case you have more than a couple of partitions. The original Ramdrive is extended from 2 to 4 Mb for better performance.

Obviously, the files: “pmagic.bat,” “dimage.bat,” and “ghost.bat” referred to are called from the body of the CD – examples are given below.

- & here's the batch file for Norton Ghost:

Notes:

Any files below not present in the above standard W98/98SE floppy can be found in %root drv%\Windows\Command\ - or in the “oldmsdos” folder in your W9x CDROM, or in our links.

Your country/keyboard layout may differ from that shown [US] – check in your existing config.sys for the correct code.

CDROM/SCSI drivers – those shown above are the standard ones included in the W98/98SE floppy – yours may differ; in any case, type “rem”[space] before any config.sys entries of files you won’t need – this saves memory.

The lowest CD-device-letter is set to “X” – if you have more than 3 such devices you’ll need to set the letter higher up the alphabet.

When you’re satisfied with this floppy & have tested it, save an uncompressed image of it with one of the 3 tools listed above – most folk use WinImage.

Now make a folder on a Hard Drive, & copy mouse.com; mouse.ini; dimage.bat; pmagic.bat; & ghost.bat; into it. Make three sub-folders called: "GHOST"  “PQDI” & “PQDM” for Ghost, DriveImage, & Partition Magic – you may include the DriveImage *.PQI image-file of a working installation into the PQDI folder.

Now all you need do is fire up your favourite burning app & set it to make a boot CD containing the above files & 2 folders; with the image you have just made as its floppy-image.

And now for the fun part  - burning the CD  - let's try CDRWin:

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