How to create a boot disk

Level of difficulty: Easy

During maintaining a computer or specifically, for particular troubleshooting purposes, you must have heard about the utility of the boot disk. Even after major component damage or hard drive crashes, you must have seen how the operating system is re-formatted or re-installed using something called a boot disk. To put it simply, a bootable disk is a disk that allows the user to boot from the disk, instead of from the hard disk drive. The commonest examples of boot disks include game disks, and disks containing the operating system. By using the boot disk, virus damage could be avoided, which is greatly beneficial when the HDD is being formatted, or has been corrupted. Using a boot disk is also great while trying to cleanup a computer after any error diagnosis or major system component erasure.

Materials Needed:
- Specialized software
Step 1
To create a boot disk, one must have CD-burning software like Nero installed within the computer. To initiate the creation process, click on Nero and drag down the CD-type option. From the option, select the CD-Rom option (ISO option) and click on the ISO option to configure/customize the data files that will constitute the boot disk. These changes being made, click on the NEW option. Next, select the preferred files and drop them from the browser window to the ISO window. After the drag process, select the ‘Recorder’ option and click on it to select the option ‘Image Recorder’. From that option, go to the ‘Write CD’ dialog tab to initiate CD-burning. Otherwise, one might also access the Nero toolbar and manually select the ‘Write CD’ option under the ‘Files’ header.
Step 2
Before actually initiating the burning process, one must check the ‘CD Burning’ properties to make sure that writing conditions and preferences are checked. Next, one must name the CD, and select an appropriate path to place the burned CD-image. Once the imaging process begins, there is nothing much to do except keep a regular check on the process bar. Once the process ends, the boot disk should be preserved carefully to be used during the lifetime of the computer, or until upgrading the program itself.
Step 3
Boot disks are generally used for Operating system installation/repairs. However, they might also be used for data recovery, data purging, customizing an operating interface, direct administrative access or software demos. Whatever might the usage be, boot disks are an extremely efficient way to directly control or initiate any computer environment.