bootable iso question

for some reason my cd/dvd burner only burns corrupt disks and i have a bootable iso of vista ultimate 32 bitand it doesnot have an upgrade option and was wondering if it was possible to just boot straight from an iso when you turn the computer on any ideas on how to do this

 

What software do you use for burning DVD's?

 

try limiting burn speed for dvd's

 

i have used
nero 8
magic iso
alcohol 120%
roxio
i have tried to burn at 2x,8x,12x and a couple of others i always used to burn cd's fine but ever since i went to burn a dvd it was corrupt and ever since then it only makes corrupt disks

 

AFAIK there is no way to boot from an .iso image file. It seems to me that your DVDRW drive has malfunctioned. One thing you can do if your motherboard BIOS has the option, is to boot to a thumb drive (USB flash drive) which you have made bootable and which stores the image. Just putting the .iso file on it won't work. You'd have to install a boot image on it that will support the installing of the .iso, and the .iso contents must be written to the flash drive. Here's some links that you will find helpful:
http://www.weethet.nl/english/hardware_bootfromusbstick.php
http://www.bootdisk.com/pendrive.htm
http://www.ngine.de/index.jsp?pageid=4176
http://www.bay-wolf.com/usbmemstick.htm
That should be more than enough to get you started. A lot of the info is for XP, but I think much of it apply to Vista also. I'll poke around a bit more and if I find something more for Vista, I'll post it.... good luck!!!!!!!!!

[dlb]

EDIT: check out this article for info about how to install Vista from the flash drive. First, make sure the flash drive is 4gb or bigger (Vista Ultimate will not fit on a 2gb drive). Second, you will have to extract the ISO image file. You can do this with many 'zip' type programs like TUGzip (free) or WinRAR (not free). All the commands in step 2 of the article are performed from the command prompt. In step 3, you'd modify the copy location to reflect where your extracted ISO image is. For example, lets say you extracted it to C:\ISOFILE. The changed command would be:
xcopy~c:\ISOFILE\*.*~/s~/e~/f~x: and where you see the squiggly thing ~ is actually just a space so use a space and not the squiggly thing. x: is the letter of your USB flash drive.

I was just thinking.... I'm not sure, but maybe one of the ISO tools out there (like PowerISO) will allow you to write the .iso image directly to the flash drive.... it's worth looking into....

Good luck!!! Let us know how it goes!

 

Just my 2 cents. I have had horrible experiences with Roxio and as soon as I saw Roxio mentioned in your post I shuttered. The only two times in my life I installed Roxio I ended up reformating my drive and starting from scratch to get things right again. Uninstalling and no amount of Roxio forum help would cure the ills. Granted it was a long time ago but I would be hard pressed to go through that again. What you need to do is to uninstall all of your burning programs, get the nero general uninstall tool and run it for any version you have installed in the past which could be 6 7 or 8. Run a driver cleaning tool and look for any drivers that may have been left behind by roxio or the other burners. Run "windows installer cleanup" and see if there is anything in there that should be gone but is not.

After all that you can install one burning application although if you choose Nero I would go for version 6. And do not under any circumstances install Roxio again. It would probably be best to keep it simple to start like with freeware like Imgburn or CDBurnerXP Pro. Finally go into your Device manager and to the cd/dvd rom section and uninstall your drive (if you have a virtual drive like daemon tools don't uninstall that one just your real drive, a virtual drive will have an scsi in its name), and restart the PC and windows will refresh the drivers for your ailing rom drive. You might also invest in a rom drive lens cleaning disk, I run mine at least once a year after blowing out the drive through the open tray with canned air.