OT: Bootable CD's

["Paul Gordon" <paul_gordon@xxxxxxx>]

Sorry for the OT post, but I bet someone here knows the answer to this...

I'm trying to burn a bootable CD, (never done one before), for a customer
to
use as a recovery CD, with a ghost image of an entire C: drive on it, plust
all the ghot config files to automaticalyl restore the image.

I'm slightly confused over some of the options I've got:

Acording to Nero's help file, I can use floppy emulation, harddisk
emulation, or no emulation. with floppy emulation, the bootable CD behaves
after booting just as if a floppy disk had been inserted into the floppy
drive. This also true for the drive letter which is of course 'A'. The
floppy disk drive (normally 'A') may then be accessed through the drive
letter 'B'. The amount of the boot data is of course limited by the maximum
capacity of the floppy disk (for example 1.44 MB)

That is all fine and dandy, and as far as it goes is perfectly clear to me.
BUT, what I'm not entirely clear on, is can I then still use the remaining
648.6MB of CD capacity for putting my data on as well? - the way I
"think"
it should work is that the CD then has a "boot" area, which is an
emulation
of a floppy disk (thus limited to 1.4MB), onto which I can then load the
standard DOS based CDROM drivers (MSCDEX) and so on, which should them load
up CDROM support, and mount the CD as the next available drive letter,
allowing me to access the rest of the data on the CD.. I'm let to this
conclusion for two reasons:
1) It would be plainly stupid to engineer a system where a 650MB CD is
completely crippled down to 1.44MB just to enable it to be bootable!
2) The nuance of the text in Nero's helpfile, - see above where it says
"The
amount of boot data is limited"... Notice it specifically says boot
data,
and not total CD capacity...

Can anyone tell me if this is right or not? - when using floppy emulation,
can I make a CD appear as BOTH a 1.44MB drive A: AND a 648.4MB Drive D:
simultaneously?

I'd prefer to use floppy emulation rather than harddisk emulation, just
because it will be so much easier. - I'd have to prepare a 650MB partition
on my harddisk to be the model for the CD (a pain), plus on the target
machine, using harddisk emulation means that the drive letters of the
"real"
harddisks in the PC all get bumped up by one, which will confuse me when
I'm
setting up the ghost options, and I'm bound to overwrite the wrong
partition!

I've tried to burn one as a floppy-emulation boot CD, but on the target
machine, it just hangs at the "booting from CD" message during
startup..
(So I know the BIOS has recognised the CD as bootable...)

Any thoughts / suggestions?....

TIA

Paul G.

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