by david
29. April 2011 23:31
Download
I've been experimenting with the mkisofs tool to make bootable ISO images for burning onto CD. This tool can be downloaded from the CDRTOOLS site (make sure you use the latest *stable* release).
The command line I'm using is:
mkisofs.exe -J -N -l -v -relaxed-filenames -b Floppy.img -volid "BootCD" -o "BootCD.iso" CDfiles
...where "CDfiles" is the name of a folder containing the floppy disk image (named "Floppy.img") as well as anything else you want to put onto the CD-ROM. I'm doing this from a command prompt in Windows 7 and it seems to work very well.
To make the CD bootable I've been using my bootable floppy image. This causes the CD-ROM to boot as if it were a floppy disk. You'll see the files inside the disk image appear as if it were a real floppy drive when the CD boots up. I've included the the generic CD-ROM drivers, and you should see the actual CD-ROM appear as drive X:.
You'll also get a 10Mb RAM drive, giving you some *writable* disk space to play with. This version simply boots to a basic DR-DOS system, but I'm blogging it since it may come in handy for other purposes...
You can burn the resulting ISO image to a CD, or simply try it out by attaching the ISO in Virtual PC or VirtualBox and booting from it. Here is a screenshot of the ISO booted in Virtual PC:
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