linux boot CD
 

for the past 5-6 months I have had to boot from a floppy disk, and it takes about 5 minutes to boot the kernel off of the floppy...I want to make a boot CD to work like my boot floppy, my CD-R/RW drive is only detected as a CD-ROM drive in linux for some reason, so I have to do this in windows :( does anyone know how I can do this?

And using a program like Record Now! isn't an option as the floppy drive in the windows box is really screwy, so I thought about maybe making a tar.gz archive of the boot floppy, and then uploading it to my private FTP server...then on windows, download the tar.gz archive (yes I can uncompress the archive) then burn what is in the archive to CD...I'm not sure if this would work or not, so I am going wait for a reply before I try it.

Any particular reason you can't use a bootloader (lilo or grub)? It would make your life a lot easier than using boot media every time.

Creating the boot cdrom is not trivial, but not too tough. Give this page a read:
http://tldp.net/HOWTO/Bootdisk-HOWTO/cd-roms.html

After making the iso you can ftp it to your windows box and burn...

Check out the man page for 'mkbootdisk'.
On some distributions, there is an --iso option. So that command would be:
makebootdisk --iso <kernel-version>

This will produce an .iso image of a boot disk that you can burn to cdrom. With a 2.6 kernel, the kernel is too large to make a boot floppy. The Mandrake mkbootdisk script doesn't have an --iso option, but the mkrescue script does.
Another option is to produce a lilo boot floppy. This would entail changing the 'boot=' entry to 'boot=/dev/fd0' and rerunning /sbin/lilo. This just write the lilo boot-strap loader to floppy. The kernel and initrd files will load from the hard disk.
Read through the lilo or grub documentation for more details. Also, the www.tldp.org site should have many how-to's of interest.

I can't use a bootloader because of read errors...I have been trying to fix the problem for about 6 months...I may have figure it out though.

I get this error when running the mkisofs:

mkisofs: Missing pathspec.
Usage: mkisofs [options] file...

Use mkisofs -help
to get a list of valid options.

I'm not sure why though :(

? What sort of 'read errors' ?

Anyway, mandrake has mkrescue --iso, which is cool... Not sure about options for other linuxies...

I get "GRUB loading 2Read error" the Read error part showing up about 1/2 second after "GRUB loading 2"

I tried mkbootdisk --iso 2.4.22-1.2115.nptl
it starts reading the floppy drive, and after about 5-10 minutes it stops...I search for an iso image and there are none...except for smootwall.iso (downloaded it, transfered it over to windows with pen drive) I think there may be somthing I am supposed to do other than adding the --iso option

I sounds to me like your boot floppy is bad, and the 'mkbootdisk --iso' command is trying to copy files from it. I think your best bet is to read up one of the how-to's on how to use the XP's NTLDR.EXE program to boot into linux from the hard drive rather than using a boot disk.

If you are having a problem booting up, you could boot up using the installation disk. I'm assuming that the installation disk uses the grub boot loader.
Press the escape key at the first prompting so you get into the text mode instead. Press the 'c' key to get in the command mode. Now you could either locate the 'menu.lst' file (usually in /boot/grub/menu.lst) or enter the 'kernel' 'initrd' and 'root' lines yourself and then the 'boot' command. You can use grub's autocompletion feature to save a lot of typing. This should allow you to start linux normally, instead of chroot'ing to your root partition.

After that, you can install the boot loader on the root partition and continue with the instructions in the how-to

I just remembered I had another drive with windows on it, I can't run both hard drives at the same time though, and I normally run linux...see why I forgot I had it? just so everyone knows, I can't run both drives at once because if I have them both connected and powered, it just freezes at "Updating DMA pool...." during boot of the computer, and I am nearly 100% sure that it's the psu, so, does anyone know of a program for windows that makes iso images? I know I have burning software that can make a CD into an ISO, but is there any programs that can make a floppy into an ISO?