coolforcats

Thanks for the reply.. I'm obviously not following these tutorials very well. For instance this one you linked to is telling me i downloaded 3 files from Microsoft - which i didn't. I have a gazillion files in four or five directories, plus other files strewn about, that i downloaded from MSDN inside an image file. So the starting point they are working from is not the same as mine, and i'm just not advanced enough to make enlightened leaps of understanding here. I ended up finding one DVD containing an ISO i had downloaded from MSDN, and this one for sure doesn't boot, so i now have a 'guinea pig'. It is a copy of Win XP SP3 x86 where no key is required. It doesnt come up as bootable in ImgBurn, it just says 'ISO9660'. So I went and extracted everything in this ISO to a folder on my HD. I have a few other ISOs that i just figured out how to 'fix' ie. make bootable, by recompiling the image straight from the burned DVD using ImgBurn. I used another program ISOBuster to open one of those bootable ISOs of XP and get the 'Microsoft Corporation' boot file and stuck it somewhere on my drive. I then went back to ImgBurn, chose 'create image from files/folders', added every folder and file that got extracted from the non-booting no-key ISO, then went to Bootable under Advanced, and pointed it to the 'Microsoft Corporation' file. Then I hit the Start button and it made the new ISO, which i tested out in VBox. It gives me an error instantly saying "CDBOOT: Couldnt find NTLDR" and then freezes. So can i just recompile it with the missing NTLDR file? Where would i find the file and where would it go in the file structure of the image? Thanks all..

Ok... Here is what I did.. These ISOs were ones that I had initially burned to a physical DVD after downloading from MSDN. A couple of months ago I decided to back these up to an external hard drive, and copied the contents of the DVD with simple copy and paste, not realizing that when I did that, for whatever reason (my error i'm sure), the boot files needed for installation of these ISOs weren't being copied with the rest of the files and folders found on the DVD. I just assumed they would be. So i had to re-create the image to the hard disk from the DVD (using ImgBurn) and it installed in my VMs. Thanks though and sorry to waste your time. I'm still befuddled about how i was to make the non-bootable ISO bootable....is the boot file something that ImgBurn has handy and just sticks in there ie. a generic boot file for whichever operating system, or do i have to have that boot file somewhere, point to it, and the program pulls it from the location and 'inserts' it into the ISO (I assume there's more to it than simply copying the file to the root directory of the DVD/ISO file)? Sorry, just trying to understand.. Thanks!

Thanks. Yes it will, but unless you go in and specify that it has to be bootable, it won't be a bootable ISO, which was part of my original question.

And i know it isnt the VM settings because i've tried other ISO's and set it up the same way with no problems. Got it set to boot from CD/DVD, got it pointing to the image file sitting on my HD.

Under the section dedicated to that, the tutorial shows how to do it if you want to write to a disc. So I have to first write it to a disc in order to make it bootable, even if i want to install it from an ISO sitting in a folder somewhere on my HD?

Ok i tried this and it says : ISO9660, Joliet, UDF (1.02), but it doesn't say Bootable...

Hello all, I'm wondering if you seasoned ImgBurn experts out there are willing to help a noob with a problem i'm having with creating an ISO that can boot/install. I've read the guides here on the site to no avail. I'll try and use the plainest possible language to describe the issue. I have an ISO, downloaded from MSDN through my school's subscription, of Vista SP1 x86 (actually I have a bunch of different Vista ISO's i downloaded from MSDN). I want to install these ISOs directly onto a VM using Sun VirtualBox. When I try to do this the way you normally would set up a new VM in VBox, it can't start up because apparently there's no boot file in these ISOs for the VM to load up the OS. So I unpacked the ISO to a specific directory in order to try and recompile it as a bootable ISO using ImgBurn. When I loaded up ImgBurn, i'm choosing the option to create image file from files/folders. I'm then adding every file and folder that got unpacked from that ISO into the box where source is to be specified. I then pick a destination and name it VistaSP1.iso. I'm choosing UDF as the filesystem, and allowing the program to create the volume label. Now the part i don't understand at all is the tab under 'Advanced' called 'Bootable Disk' which i'm supposed to use in order to make this ISO bootable when it is recompiled. If i check 'Make image bootable' i then have to specify a 'boot image' file - where do i find that? And am I supposed to use the 'Extract Boot image' option? What exactly is that doing? If someone could explain this/help me get this ISO recompiled in order to be bootable, it'd be greatly appreciated!! Thanks