I am in the process of working with a new laptop that has a DVD/CD-R drive but no floppy drive. Is it possible to make a bootable CD that will boot to a DOS prompt like a regular bootable floppy? Can you send me instructions on how to do this?

yes you can. easy cd creator by roxio does this very well. however, the catch is you have to insert a bootable floppy containing the boot environment that you want to use. on systems with no floppy, you will have to create the CD on another system.

What OS are you wanting to make a bootable CD of?

Go here http://www.bootdisk.com/
You'll find info on how to set it up and probably evewn find the boot disk files so you can make the bootable CD even without a floppy drive. There are several versions of DOS there, as well as links to useful articles on related topics.

Nero 5.0 and later versions also support bootable cd's...

Just download one of the files from bootdisk.com and burn it as a bootable cd, and you should be fine....

or, buy a external floppy drive.

no wait, i dont think the BIOS will check external drives... but worth a try

Ok guys. I have tried and tried, but all I end up doing is ruining CDs. I can't get an image off of a boot disk because my laptop has no floppy drive from which to read an already made bootdisk. I download the ones from bootdisk.com and it gives me an exe file to create one, but it asks for a floppy. I managed to get the contents of a boot disk onto my computer and went into Roxio Easy CD Creator 5.0 and did a bootable CD. It asked for an image file so i gave it the directory of the bootdisk on my hard drive and the only .BIN file in that directory is drvspace.bin, so i gave it that and burned the cd, and when it got to the part of the bios where it checks the cdrom it just sat there. Obviously didn't work. I don't know where to go from here...

refer to my earlier post, those drives are cheap anyway...

drvspace.bin is definently not the correct file to put on boot sector. If you are making a DOS bootdisk, the file should be called "io.sys". The CD writing software probably wants a track image instead of a plain file (track images are called .bin too..)

The CD-creating software asks you a disk to put on CD or a disk image. You must make that floppy or get/make a disk image that has a format supported by the writing software.

PS
Your CD-writing software should have a manual/help chapter about writing bootable CDs

Barts is about the most detailed guide on doing what you want to do. he not only tellls you how he also provides links for downloading the necessary tools including boot bin files and floppy images.

http://www.nu2.nu/bootcd/

That is a pretty good guide, and there was a link to it on bootdisk.com.