Creating a bootable Windows 2000/2003/XP CD

 

There are actually quite a few ways to go about doing this, but we’re just going to touch upon probably the quickest and easiest way to do it.

There are some prerequisites you will need to have handy.

  1. Windows installation medium copied to your HD.
  2. A CD/DVD burner.
  3. A couple gigs of space free on your HD.
  4. A blank cd/dvd or 2.

Step 1) First things first.  Download this handy dandy little utility called CDImage.  It’s a GUI based version of Microsoft’s application of the same name.  A couple of pro’s about this version:  It comes with the boot.img file.  It comes preconfigured with the most common options already selected.

Step 2) Extract the contents of the CDImage.zip file you downloaded to a directory on your HD

 

*** Future steps will assume you extracted the files to c:\cdimage ***

Step 3) Run the Utility.  You should see a screen that looks like this:

 

 

The “Root Dir of your CD” can either be your windows installation CD or a directory on your HD where you copied the medium to.

*note* Using a windows CD will make this process considerably longer.

 

Step 4) Configuration. There is only two things we have to change.  All the other options are already set.  Click on the configuration button.  Select the “Boot” tab.  Leave the box checked but make sure that the path of the boot.img file points to the path of where you extracted it from the CDImage.zip you downloaded.  *note* This boot.img file is good for windows 2000, XP, and 2003.  This boot image WILL NOT work for x64 versions.

 

See image below.

 

 

The last thing that needs to be set is the Volume label.  This can be done on the “Creation” tab.  You can change this to pretty much whatever you want, although it is recommended that you stick with Microsoft’s default naming scheme.

 

 

Step 5) The final step with this program is to actually create the image.  Click on the creation button, give a glance over what is going to be done and then click the “Start Image Creation” button.  This will create an .ISO file in the folder you specified earlier.

 

 

 

Step 6) Burn the .ISO file to a CD or DVD using your favorite burning software.  Steps on how to do this on some of the popular burning software will be covered in the section titled “Burning ISO files to a CD”