Trying to make bootable CDs / DVDs with ImgBurn

[Seeker47]

From supposedly bootable ISOs: a few successes, several failures. Hoping to identify the wrong or missing ingredient(s).

I'm using Write Mode, following the right steps, according to what I've read. (I know that Lightning UK stops by here sometimes, so I'm hoping he might see this.) Don't get me wrong: I'm a big fan of your work, and ImgBurn has long been my Go To app for burning video. Just found your guide for taking FLAC to CD, and the first few trials of that went quite well. It's just this bootable media thing that -- so far, for me -- is a case of working "Not So Much."

Firstly, have to say that I'm not technically well-versed in this area, even though I've been doing this for years -- but mostly with other software. I've almost never had a problem doing this with Nero, can't recall a a single failure using RSJ (though that wasn't their version for Windows). But I'm about to look to some other programs that are capable of burning ISOs to disc, based on the non-booting results I keep seeing with IB. I may next re-try a couple of these with Nero, just to see if anything comes out differently.

The ISOs that have worked out were things like Hiren's Boot Disc (a few different versions). These seem to be Linux-based, and have files like ISOLINUX.BIN and BOOT.CAT in the root. I've also seen some working discs that had that 'El Torito' track you need a hex or sector editor to see, rather than any visible files that are clearly booting-related. Those can't be the only two mechanisms though, and I must be missing something or misunderstanding what is going on with some others. Once burned (with IB), I just get an "Error Booting CD" (or DVD). I can post what I see in the root structure of the disc, if that might help.

I think I've done the more obvious troubleshooting. These bootable ISOs are mostly coming out of RAR archives. If the ISO was corrupt, there should have been an archiver error upon extracting it. In a couple of these cases -- where I had an MD5 hash -- this checked out. There is often advice that we should burn these things at a slow speed. (I've seen examples where an older laptop's optical drive was too slow, so that if a disc was not burned at an appropriately slow speed, that disc would not be readable.) I'm burning these ISOs at 4x, which is rather slow for DVD, and gawdawful slow for CD.

What other factors should I be looking for ?

[aedipuss]

we get the picture where the iso's are coming from. but since you didn't make them or have any idea how they were made why would you expect them to work? personally i wouldn't allow anything from p2p to "boot" on my pc. you might try opening the cd with explorer and running the setup.exe or whatever is listed in the autorun.inf - it's a text file.

[TJohns]

Write mode in ImgBurn means you've a pre-existing ISO you're working with. The ISO already has all the boot info in it then - the software used to burn it can only affect the QUALITY of the burn, not what data gets put on the disk.

So the question becomes how are the non-working ISO's being created (by yourself?) compared to the others...

PS. as a check, have you tried booting the ISO's directly in VirtualBox or such before burning them