Boot CD woes and DeepBurner

As you may have read in my Nero blog entry I have had some fun and games making bootable CD's for windows autobuilds.

The problem is down to the character set. Several files that need to be copied have names like cyclad-f.inf and these get changed to cyclad_f.inf and so the installation process gets upset that it can't find the files that it needs.

The Nero blog article talked about making some changes to the way Nero burns boot CD's and for the most part this has worked for me until I started messing around with Windows 2003 and the BETA of SP2. For some reason Nero will not give me a working bootable CD where as Magic ISO will. The only problem with Magic ISO is that it requires a license and is not installed on every machine I use whereas Nero is licensed and installed. A quick hunt round the web found an application called DeepBurner.

The beauty of deep burner is not only will it create a bootable ISO file without mangling the file names but that there is a PORTABLE version that can be put on a USB Pen drive or similar and does not need installing on the target machine.

This flexibility can come in very useful when trying to throw together a quick CD for installation or similar.