Creating a Windows 7 boot DVD

You might encounter, especially on older computers, an error message CDBOOT: Cannot BOOT from the CD - Code: 5. The problem is in the innovated loader on the installation DVD.

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Written by(2012-03-01 23:00:00)

If there occurs a serious problem when working in the Windows 7 system and it is necessary to boot from the CD/DVD drive while there is nothing else available but the original installation DVD, you might encounter, especially on older computers, an error message CDBOOT: Cannot BOOT from the CD - Code: 5. The problem is in the innovated loader on the installation DVD. You might find more than one solution for this: sometimes it helps to update BIOS, boot from an installation USB disk, if available, or modify/create a new boot DVD. The latter one - creating a new boot DVD - will be described here in detail. The principle of the modification is exchanging the loader gained from the original installation Windows Vista DVD.

Requirements:

  • ISOBuster or another program that is able to extract the boot sector (www)
  • Nero 6 or higher (www).

Step by step:

  • Extracting the boot sector from a DVD - Download the ISOBuster program (or similar, such as WinISO or BBIE) from the Internet. Start the program and insert the original Windows Vista DVD into your CD/DVD drive.

  • In the tree structure on the left, choose Bootable Disc. In the right pane, click the right mouse button on the Microsoft Corporation.img file and choose "Extract Microsoft Corporation.img" from the menu. Save the file according to your preferences. In this case, we saved it to c: disk as bootcdsec.img (c:\bootcdsec.img).

In BBIE, type the following text in the command line:

bbie H:

The response will be:

BBIE - Bart's Boot Image Extractor v1.0, (c) 2001, Bart Lagerweij
http://www.nu2.nu
Reading boot record from sector 17 (0x11)
Reading boot catalog from sector 22 (0x16)
CD-ROM manufacturer/developer: "Microsoft Corporation "
1) mode "no emulation". Sector is 612 (0x264)
Writing 1 block(s) to "image1.bin"

Burning image using the Nero program

  • In the main menu, choose File and New.

  • Choose DVD from the drop down menu in the left upper corner and then select DVD-ROM (Boot).

  • On the Boot pane, choose Image file in the Source of boot image data section and enter the path to the loader file.

  • Check the "Enable expert settings" option.

  • Select the option No emulation. Your computer will consider the CD an extra disk including special drivers for CD or HDD. This option is used for CDs with Windows NT system.

  • Boot message - type in any text, e.g. AdminXP Loader (if No emulation has been selected, this option is not very important).

  • Load Segment of Sectors - keep the preset value of 07C0. This number specifies the memory address for loading the boot code.

  • Number of Loaded Sectors - Number of sectors loaded into the memory. Regarding the image size of 2048B, it is necessary that the value is set to 4 which means that each sector then has 512B.

  • Most of the other settings are to be left as default. In the ISO pane, it is important to check the option Do not add the ';1' ISO file version. Older versions of Nero do not have this option and any DVDs created this way would not work. Continue by clicking the New button.

Now you have to drag and drop the updated files (and thanks to the DVD capacity you can add other software too).

When done, start burning.

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