Instructions to make a bootable CD-ROM for Mac OS X:

1. Launch BootCD.

2. Choose a name for the CD, and enter it in the “Volume Name” field.

3. If you will be burning to a CD of a different size than 650 MB, enter the size of the CD in the "Disk Size:" field. If you need a larger RAM Disk than the default size, enter the size you want in the “Ram Disk Size:” field. Otherwise, you can feel free to leave these fields alone.

4. Click the “Create Bootable CD Image” button.

5. When prompted, enter an administrator username and password.

6. Choose a location to save the disk image in the Save dialog box that appears.

7. Wait while BootCD creates and prepares the image. This can take anywhere from about 8 to 15 minutes.

8. Eventually, a dialog box should appear telling you to choose the applications you wish to have on the disk. Choose as many applications as you wish via the Open dialog box that appears.

Note: This method works best for stand-alone, self-contained applications such as DiskWarrior; it will not work for Norton, which leaves files all over the hard disk that need to be copied to the image and will not be copied simply by copying the app itself.

9. BootCD should finish with a message telling you that you now have a bootable CD image. The image should dismount. Quit BootCD.

10. If you wish to make any further modifications to the image before burning, such as adding command-line tools, frameworks, etc., feel free to remount the image, make your changes, and then dismount the image.

11. Open Disk Utility. Choose “Burn...” from the Images menu.

12. Choose the image created by BootCD in the Open dialog box that appears.

13. Wait about 15 minutes for the image to burn.

14. You should now have a Mac OS X bootable CD!

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Instructions to boot from a Mac OS X bootable CD:

1. Insert the resulting CD in your internal CD drive, and restart your Mac while holding down the ‘C’ key.

2. Wait for the CD to boot. This may take anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes, depending on the speed of your CD-ROM drive.

3. When booting is finished, the Finder should appear with the Dock and all the applications you chose while running BootCD. Your disks should be mounted on the Desktop.

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Notes:

If an app asks you to enter an administrator password while booted from the CD, the username to use is 'root' and the password is 'bootcd' (in both cases, without the quotes).

BootCD automatically includes these applications on the CD image: System Preferences, Terminal, Disk Utility, and Console. It's not necessary to manually include these applications.

If you want to add additional files such as preference files, command line tools, etc. to the disk image after creating it, all that is necessary is to mount the disk image and copy the files using either the Finder or the Terminal.

Carbon Copy Cloner requires the following items, which are not put on the boot CD by default:

/usr/bin/perl
/usr/bin/perl5.8.1
/System/Library/Perl

If you wish to use Carbon Copy Cloner from a boot CD, just copy these files to their respective locations on the boot CD using the method described above.

The location of files that will be put on the RAM disk at boot time is at this path on the CD image:

private/etc/RamDisk/contents

The location of root's user folder on the boot CD is:

private/etc/RamDisk/contents/private/var/root/

BootCD requires that the BSD subsystem be installed. If you do not have the BSD subsystem, please install it from the OS X Install CD before running BootCD.

Booting from a CD is inherently slow. Optimizing the disk image with a disk utility such as Norton Speed Disk, Alsoft PlusOptimizer or Micromat TechTool Pro may improve performance.

This version of BootCD creates a RAM Disk for various purposes. You can choose how large the RAM Disk is via the “Ram Disk Size:” field in BootCD's main window. Increasing the size of the RAM Disk will not improve CD boot time. It only needs to be done if the RAM Disk becomes full when the boot CD is used with a smaller RAM Disk. If you want to add things to the RAM Disk, drag them to the folder etc/RamDisk/contents on the disk. Obviously, you shouldn't put so many files in there that the size of the folder exceeds the RAM Disk size that you have chosen in BootCD.

The disk image must be unmounted when you burn it. You may mount the disk image to add files to the image before burning, but you must unmount the disk afterwards before you burn the CD.

It is recommended that you use Disk Utility to burn the CD. Burning the CD with Toast is not supported and is likely to result in a non-bootable CD. If your burner is not supported by Disk Utility and you must use Toast, be sure to burn the disk image directly to the CD. Do not use the "Data" pane and add files to the CD, or you will get permission errors while burning, and you will end up with a non-bootable CD. Additionally, it is not possible to burn the disk image with Toast Lite. If you wish to use Toast, you must use Toast Deluxe as Toast Lite does not have the option to burn a disk image directly to a CD.

In any case, do not try to burn the CD using the Finder's standard CD burning features. You must burn the image directly through one of the applications designed for this purpose, not by dragging files on to a CD-R icon.