Boot disk creation

I've looked around the threads, and found nothing that gives me guidance, so new thread.

I have a large USB hard disk. I have all the apps I need in portable versions on it. What I want is a bootable CD so that I can go to any/most newer computers and boot the OS from the CD, and with USB support, let my portable USB disk be the hard drive. This way I can have XP on any machine I have access to.

I have looked at the sites for making boot CDs, they seem to be for repair/diagnostic use. I want a full XP CD to use as I have mentioned.

I have my original XP SP3 CD. I also have ERD 2005, and a few other bootable CDs if they are needed.

So, am I dreaming an impossible dream? If not, any kind soul who could steer me along would have my gratitude...

Thanks for reading this...

 

What you are after is not possible with any version of Windows. The nearest you can get is to use a Linux live CD, such as Ubuntu or Mandriva, though even with those you would not be able to use portable versions of any Windows apps as Linux needs Wine to run Windows apps and Wine isn't available on any Linux live CD AFAIK.

Having said that, these Linux live CDs have great functionality, well exceeding that of your portable apps I would suspect, including full networking and internet access, USB. file management, office apps, etc, etc.

 

Thanks, now I know a direction to take...

 

Did you read about the BartPE boot disk? It can boot up in XP and you can access USB drives. I use it to ghost drives to my external hard drive all the time.
The drive has to be plugged in at boot. I think they had a USB plug in for using PNP, but I just plug the drive in at boot & it works fine.
Side note not all portable apps work in the PE environment because they look for the OS on the C: drive when they scan & your not running from C:, you just have to try them out.

 

Thanks foogoo and earthling

And just a note for anybody who cares, I made a live CD, puppy linux, and it does what I want. It connects to the net, mounts my USB portable hard drive, reads PDFs, plays video, and it is lean.
Further, I used BURNCDCC to burn the iso to CD, it only does that function, iso>cd, and does it well...