Mate at work has a laptop which is displaying error messages on boot -teling him that no boot drive can be found . CD/DVD lights up as if looking for bootable CD .Looking like HDD corruption ,either on his boot loader or disc .Wantedme to get him aboot disk . No problem ,formats floppy and adds powermax from Maxtor (which can usually suss out a dodgy disk).

NOOOO -he replies -only got a CD ,no A drive . Firstof all tried to make boot disk using Ahead Nero and my writable CD - no joy (using boot flopy as image )

GoogledBoot disk, came up with things like Folder2ISO ,Deepburner coupled with Winimage , but no bootable cd .

Can someone shed some light as to where I'm going wrong -before I loose my remaining sparse bit of hair or mend up with a selection of CD s with DOS FILES ,BUT NO BOOT .

Make a system disk from another XP system (right-click A:, choose tools, IIRC, but I don't have a floppy here), add your tools to it, make a bootable CD in nero from that.

Thanks chris -will give that a go , but will get some cd rw first .

get hold of UBCD and use that

Make sure nothing in the CD drive, and no USB devices attached.

Thanks ,gents (and if applicable gentesses) - as said - wil try these later ,when I get CD RW DISCS .All ,and any suggestions welcome -will try them all and repaort back .

Well -success - got hold of a few cd rw and played with a few progs ,then went back to an old version of Nero -one that came with my old CD writer,and used a bootable floppy as a boot source .Bingo -so now I've got a bootable CD startup disk .

Thanks to all who replied .