I want to boot my laptop from a CD with Win98SE on it so that I can use DriveImage to backup the hard disk. My laptop is running Win2K and the backup hard disk is a USB hard drive. I am using Roxio Easy CD Creator 6, which allows you to create a bootable CD. I define the project as all the files from the Win98SE startup floppy, use the floppy boot image as the boot file, then copy over about 1.1M of the drive image files. When I create the bootable CD, I get an "invalid system disk" message or a "file I/O" error message that prompts me to insert another CD and press any key.

BTW, I can boot from the drive image CD directly but I need to use the Win98 files to add USB CD support.

I've tried a few variation on Roxio -- emulate a 2.88M floppy, emulate a hard disk, or no emulation, with no success. I've also tried changing the CD format from Juliet to ISO. Some online info suggested changing the sector size from 1 to 4. All I get is the error message. So maybe here is some insight. If I burn the CD without the drive image files, it boots! Obviously in this case it easily maps as a 1.44MB floppy. So it must be something about having greater than 1.44MB of files.

The Roxio help files imply this should be doable, yet I can't get it to work. Any insight on why it fails, and how to make it work?

Are you adding the extra files to the boot image file or just to the CD. You want to add them to the cd not to the boot image. If you add them to the image file and it's ends up larger than 1.44 meg it will error out on you. It sounds like you are doing it correctly but I just want to make sure. I have made several emergency CD's with easy cd creator. The files I add to the project do not contain the files from the boot floppy. Those files will be burned as part of the boot image files and you don't need to copy them again. When you select use floppy drive emulation you should also see a box with the path to the bootimage. You just click browse and go to the floppy. ECDC will copy the files from the floppy to creat the bootimage. It will show up on the cd as bootcat.bin or something. After that you can fill up the CD and then burn it. If you have a cd-rw I would use it for testing, saves on the coasters.