Easy CD Creator and Nero can take a working boot floppy and make a bootable
CD from that floppy.
Additionally, they can add extra files. Afterall, a CD is over 100X the
size of a floppy. The trick in Easy CD is to first let it covert the floppy
into special boot files, which appear in the project window. Then, you
manually copy as many other filesw as will fit on the CD. However, when you
boot, the floppy image will be called "A:\", whereas the rest of the files
will appear on the CD drive under a different letter. The other trick is
that you must use a floppy with DOS-level CD support (in order to see the
rest of the CD).
I would highly recommend getting such a DOS floppy (as a self-extracting
image) from
www.bootdisk.com.
The other way to boot a PC from a CD is to get one of several (free)
recovery CD images (usually in ISO format), then it to a CD, using an option
like "burn CD form image". Do not simply maka a "data CD", not with an ISO
image. Such images can be found at:
http://www.911cd.net/
http://trinityhome.org/trk/
http://ubcd.sourceforge.net/
I should also mention that the windows XP CD is itself bootable, and you can
run somehting called the recovery console from it. Link about recovery
console follow:
http://www.wown.com/j_helmig/wxprcons.htm
http://www.xxcopy.com/xxcopy33.htm (near bottom)
http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/win_xp_rec.htm
Unfortunately the recovery console is very limited in what it can do. A
better XP-based appraoch is to make a Bart's PE bootable CD. This may take
a while the files time, but it is a very powerful tool, with many available
plug-ins, most of whihc are free. Link to Bart's follows:
http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/