Burn ISOs to bootable CD

[luehmannt]

Hi folks,

I´ve read several pages but haven´t found what I´m looking for - so far..

I have many tiny ISO-images of Live-CDs on my HDD and want to burn them onto one CD - but I don´t want to extract every ISO before burning!

So I´ld prefer to make a boot menu and copy it - alltogether with my ISOs - to a CD using for example NERO.

If I missed something fundamental here - please pardon me for wasting Your time..

Greetings..

[jaclaz]

Well, what you need is a CD bootmanager, i.e. a program that allows you to choose WHICH of the several ISO's you have on your CD you want to boot from.

There are several ones, most notably CDSHELL:

http://www.cdshell.org/

and

BCDW

http://bootcd.narod.ru/index_e.htm

Also the Grand Unified Boot Loader (GRUB) is capable of doing this.

Unfortunately, not ALL iso's (and Operating Systems) boot the same way, so some tweaking will be necessary.

Search on this and the 911CD forum for the above terms and for multiboot.

jaclaz

[luehmannt]

ThanX jaclaz,

I´ll have a look at these programs!

But I´ve never meant to boot the ISOs by itself - normally I´ld burn them with the BURN_FROM_IMAGE_FILE option of NERO - so I want them - lets say - unpacked on my CD but don´t want to unpack them to my HDD first!

..though booting ISOs would be nice - but I doubt this could work - could it ??

btw - GRUB as bootManager of a multi-boot CD - never heard of this before - although I always liked it better than LILO... maybe I´ll have to search the manpage more thorough

Bye for now..

[jaclaz]

So, you want to access (read only) the contents of the .ISO files?

For this you need EITHER:

a Filesystem driver capable of reading ISO filesystem, such as the one that comes with Winimage:

http://www.winimage.com/

or a "Virtual Cd-ROM drive", like this FREEWARE one:

http://www.elby.de/fun/software/

of course there are many more programs like the above, freeware or shareware/commercial.

The difference between the two above is that the first one opens an .iso file much like say Winzip or 7zip open an archive, whilst the second actually mounts a virtual drive (i.e. a new drive letter is assigned) to which you mount the image, not unlike the linux mount command.

jaclaz