Making a Bootable Disk with Easy CD Creator

I recently had to create a bootable CD with Easy CD Creator so that I could deploy my image over our network via CD’s and DVD’s. Well there were some things I didn’t know that might have come in handy and saved me some time when I was burning these disks. I am here to try to prevent you from making the same mistakes as I did, so I hope this information helps you successfully create working boot disks the first try.

So a little about the situation I am using Altiris as my deployment software, and I uploaded the image in CD sized files and a self-extracting EXE file. That worked just fine but I ran into several problems when I was trying to burn the CD’s and DVD’s and get them to work. My first problem was that I didn’t have a boot file that worked. You can create one of these in many ways but the easiest I found was to go to www.bootdisk.com (a free website) and create a bootable floppy then emulate it on the CD, which Easy CD Creator allows you to do.

Once you have the boot file and it works you are ready to create your CD or DVD with Easy CD Creator, so open the software and the next parts are what caused me the most pain. First you need to go to the main tool bar under File>>New CD Project>>Bootable CD, a new window will open and you will want to normally keep the defaults. Just to be sure though make sure Floppy Emulation (1.44mb) is selected, Load Segment and Sector count shouldn’t need to be edited. Then under Emulation click existing image file and browse to the boot.bin file you created at www.bootdisk.com, and then you can hit ok and move on to the next screen.

Now you will be back at the start screen but now you will have two files in your ready to burn section they should be the boot.bin file and bootcat.bin file. Next you will want to add your image files to the CD, to do this browse to the folder containing these files, highlight the files you want and click the add arrow and they will be put into your ready to burn section. Once you have your disk the way you want it then click the record button, this will take you to the most important steps of the disk, they must be followed perfectly or it won’t work.

First make sure to un-check the option that says Buffer Underrun prevention, this for some reason ruins the disk and makes it a coaster. Next thing you will want to be sure that you change the Record Method from Finalize to Finalize Session Don’t the CD, if you do these two things you should be able to pick any other options and it still should work. I also found a couple of instances where burning speed had to be reduced for the first CD, in order to get it to work. That was very rare errors so just keep it in mind as you work on this.

After I did this for all my CD’s then I just used the Easy CD Creator Disk copier function for the rest of the CD’s. Or you can just select how many you want to burn as you are doing it and it will ask you to put in a new disk as each one completes. I have attached in this article some screen shots, please refer to them if you are having troubles doing this.

Also you can get a trial version or buy a version of Easy CD Creator at www.roxio.com and some other products. Also you can use almost any CD software to do this just make sure that the correlating options are changed in order to make the disk work as it should.