Bootable CD

This brief tutorial is about how to create your own bootable CD. For information about bootable CDs see El-Torito and ISO 9660

Difficulty level
Beginner

Requirements

• mkisofs
• A CD burning program
• A 1.44M floppy image, 1474560 bytes to be exact. See Disk Images for a list of programs that can help on this.

How it works

First, lets go to the directory where your floppy image (floppy.img) is located:

$ cd ~/myosname

First we create a directory to store the contents of the CD:

$ mkdir cdcontents

Next we copy everything we want on the CD into here

$ cp files/* cdcontents

You can create extra subdirectories if necessary. After that, we need to copy our floppy image in there as well

$ cp floppy.img cdcontents

Now our directory stores all we need. We can continue creating the CD image:

$ mkisofs -o mybootcd.iso -V MyOSName -b floppy.img cdcontents

This will create the CD image:

-o mybootcd.iso	send output to mybootcd.iso
-V MyOSName	the CD's volume label is MyOSName
-b floppy.img	this is the boot image. Note that its both located in the current directory and in the CD's directory
cdcontents	this is the directory where all the files are to be taken from

If you have done everything correct, a CD image is created in the current directory. You can burn this image to CD with your favorite CD burner application.

See Also

Articles

• Bootable El-Torito CD with GRUB Legacy - how to create a "no emulation" bootable CD