Greetings from snowy Oregon! Hey, I'm working on a dual boot project of a slightly different kind (hackintosh meets XP) but I figured y'all were more than qualified to master my my pesky little question. The beginning of my road to dual booting the HD of my little sub notebook requires that I update the bios on the sucker. To do that, I can't boot from the internal HD, so I have an external CD/DVD drive. So far so good, right? I have two different Windoze cd's that are bootable but as luck would have it, they're both OEM restoration CDs that dive right into an unstoppable "let's nuke the HD and reinstall windows" routine. That's right, both CDs only sing one tune. This is going to sound very clueless to all you veteran and budding admins out there but I just need a simble bootable CD or DVD that gets me to the desktop so I can run this bios update. Can someone point me to one, please? I can't believe the hours I've spent looking for a downloadable image of such a beast or trying different recipes for how to make one. It's just silly how many hours I've wasted but it seems I'm always missing some pesky little ingredient. Some obscure DLL that someone's script can't locate, some special revision of a specific disc burning app, an non OEM installer CD, etc, etc.. I found this forum via nLite as I had read it's description a bit too fast and though it would let me make a stripped down my installer CD and remove the autorun that goes straight to the installer but alas, nLite actually serves a slightly different purpose. Definitely a cool one but not what I need. Apologies, I digress. I'm sure there's a downloadable image site that's of some obvious name like www.doodWhatYouNeedIsRightInFrontOfYourFace.com but alas it has eluded me. Save me before my head banging against the wall becomes a fatal injury. HUGE thanks to all, Viper