by david
19. May 2011 22:46
What with all this fiddling around with boot disks and ISO files, I found that there were not many tools around to do *exactly* what I wanted ... namely edit a 2.88Mb bootable floppy image and turn that into a bootable ISO. So I've written IsoCobbler. It doesn't have a GUI, it is command driven, but it suits my purposes. Even though it looks very retro, this is a C# application running on .Net 4. Here is a screenshot of it in action, on Windows 7:

It comes with a default boot image included, and makes it simple for anybody to edit it. You can insert your own zip file called "content.zip" containing a batch file called "start.bat" along with any DOS applications you want. Anything inside "content.zip" will be extracted into a RAM Disk and "start.bat" will be executed when the boot disk runs.
I guess that it might also be useful for creating some sort of emergency boot disk, you could load the zip file with all kinds of tools.
So here is the application (you'll need .Net framework v4 installed and it's best to run it as an administrator) and the source code (Visual Studio 2010). Please drop me a line if you find it useful. If I get time I may fiddle with it some more...