Creating a bootable cd starts with a bootable floppy disk, but my new workstation lacks a floppy drive. Download Virtual Floppy Drive. Uncompress and run ‘vfd /install’, then run ‘vfdwin’, start the service, switch to a device tab, choose a file, drive letter, put it in disk mode. Now I have an A: drive.

You can format the disk using windows explorer, then use a framework like netbootdisk.com to create the disk. Save the image and use it with vmware or keep it around and convince other programs like nero it is a real floppy drive so you can burn bootable cds. The cool part is that if you make a *dos boot floppy with cdrom drivers, you can then access the cdrom as a drive letter and have 700mb of utilities, or with network support simply connect to a network share and map it to a drive letter. We also do this with bootable dvd’s to give the network a break and distribute large, bootable, ghost images.

Unfortunately netbootdisk only supports logging into a domain with the “full” redirector enabled, and everytime i enable it, even with everything else disabled, there isn’t enough conventional memory. Thanks again bill. I’ll be back to troubleshooting this on monday.