Creating and Using a Bootable CD-R Disc

If your system and drive support the El Torito Specification (http://www.phoenix.com/resources/specs-cdrom.pdf), which allows booting from CD, a bootable CD can be a useful emergency fallback. The process required to create a bootable CD varies according to the mastering software package you use. See the documentation for details.

To boot from CD, the CD/DVD-ROM drive and system BIOS must support CD as a boot device, which nearly all recent models do. To set your system to boot from CD, run BIOS Setup and locate an option named “Boot Sequence” or something similar. That option will typically be set to something like “A:, C:, CD-ROM, SCSI” by default. Insert the bootable CD, change the boot sequence to make the CD-ROM the first boot device, and restart the system. The system will boot from the CD, which it will recognize as drive A:. (The actual FDD will become B:.)

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