Command to test if a CD/ISO is bootable?

[John Abreau]

On Thu, 2004-07-01 at 15:10, Scott Garman wrote:

> Here's a silly question:
> 
> Is there a command or byte sequence I can extract from an ISO or CD-ROM
> to test if it is bootable without actually trying to boot from it?
> Overall I'm also curious exactly what it is that makes a bootable CD
> bootable.

As I understand it, an x86 bootable CD essentially has an image of a 
bootable floppy on it, and presumably a bit of magic in its table of 
contents to point the PC's bios at that image. I have no idea if a 
MacOS or Solaris/SPARC bootable CD does somthing similar; I would 
imagine the SPARC implementation at least would be less of a kludge, 
but I don't know this for certain. No doubt a quick google search 
would answer this. 

-- 
John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix
Email jabr at blu.org / WWW http://www.abreau.net / PGP-Key-ID 0xD5C7B5D9
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