BCDL - Bootable CD Loader

[kethd]

BCDL is a wonderful tool for forcing CD drives to boot. BCDL is a boot floppy that auto-boots CDs even if the BIOS is having trouble booting the CD, or if you cannot set the BIOS to boot from CD.

BCDL is just a 20KB download from here:
http://bootcd.narod.ru/bcdl150z.zip
which unpacks into a 1440KB image of a floppy disk. Use rawrite, RawWrite or Linux dd to write that image to a floppy. Boot that floppy and it will immediately boot the first bootable CD it can find. Works with multiple ATAPI CD drives!

Because it uses an old VIDE-CDD.SYS driver, it will not boot DVDs. However, if you replace that driver with the new open source XCDROM.SYS (Jack R. Ellis 2006) driver (rename it to VIDE-CDD.SYS) it will work even better and boot DVDs! (XCDROM.SYS is actually included in UBCD and works. The latest version is 2.2 21feb2006 available here:
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/util/system/xcdrom/
The author seems to have moved on to creating a new QCDROM series of drivers:
http://johnson.tmfc.net/dos/qcdrom.html)

The only drawback is that BCDL runs automatically without allowing the user to choose which CD/DVD drive to boot from, and is not open source. Can someone tell us how to put an open source wrapper around XCDROM.SYS to make bootable floppies with menus for booting CDs?

It would be great if future versions of UBCD included BCDL. It could be usable someday to boot from UBCD and then chain boot to other things. But until then, it is only 20KB, and allows creating a simple powerful boot floppy for booting UBCD on older computers.

A great website is MDGx:
http://www.mdgx.com/newtip1.htm#CDROM4
but I don't really understand how all these modules fit together, how to use parameters etc -- maybe someone could explain how to build a full open source bootable floppy based on XCDROM?

===
BCDL
Bootable CD Loader v1.50Z
Copyright (c)2004 by reanimatolog. http://bootcd.narod.ru

Starting BCDL...
IDE/ATAPI CD-ROM Device Driver Version 1.11 18:37:57 04/25/95

CD-ROM drive #0 found on 1F0h port slave device
CD-ROM drive #1 found on 170h port master device

Cannot boot from CD. Press any key to boot from HDD or ESCape to reboot...

VIDE-CDD.SYS /D:NOT_USED
USB_CD.SYS /D:NOT_USED
USBASPI.SYS /r
ASPI8U2.SYS
ASPI8DOS.SYS
ASPI7DOS.SYS
ASPI4DOS.SYS
ASPI2DOS.SYS
ASPICD.SYS /D:NOT_USED

===
NwDsk335fds
A:\BIN
BCDW.COM 10-11-04
SHSURDRV.EXE 01-23-06
XCDROM.SYS 01-31-06
XDMA.SYS 01-31-06
A:\LIB\ASPI
ASPI2DOS.CAB etc

===
XCDROM V2.2, 2-08-2006.
Driver name is "NOT_USED".
UltraDMA controller at I-O address FF00h, Chip I.D. 10395513h.
Unit 0: Primary-slave, SAMSUNG CD-R/RW SW232B, PIO mode.
Unit 1: Secondary-master, _NEC DVD_RW ND-3550A, ATA-33.

Cannot boot from CD. Press any key to boot from HDD or ESCape to reboot...

[jeanetti]

How can I play a computer game without needing the CD ROM? I have an older computer game (1999) that I still play. I have the CD ROM. It won't play without the disk. Is there a way to put all that info on my computer so I can play it without having to use the CD anymore?
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