Producing a bootable CD is a relatively straightforward process. You need a program to pull the boot image file from your regular Windows Server 2003 CD and a CD drive capable of writing to CDs. And, of course, you need an installed program to create the CD. I used to pull the boot image file from the CD. ISO Buster is a part freeware and part shareware data recovery tool.
You can use the freeware capabilities to do what we need to do here, but you will probably want to go make a donation or register it once you see all that it can do. I used to create the CD in this example, but you can adapt these instructions to any CD-burning program. Follow these six steps to make the CD bootable: • Download and install ISO Buster. Insert the regular Server 2003 CD into your CD drive and load ISO Buster. • Expand the CD drive in ISO Buster until you see a floppy disk icon with the Bootable CD label. Click on the bootable CD in the left pane, and in the right pane of ISO Buster you will see a file called Microsoft Corporation.img, which is the boot image file for the CD. Right click on the.img file and select Extract BootImage.img.