This is a very urgent situation. We have a network down situation. I went to rebuild my Cisco CallManager server and only after I wiped the drives did I discover that my copy of the CM software boot cd is not bootable...
This is a copy of the CD I'm working with, and I think what happened is that some schmuck copied the CD to a hard drive, then burned it to CD - thereby making it unbootable.
I know that the boot.bin file needs to be located at sector 20 on the CD in order for it to properly boot up the bootimg.bin file. When the CD was copied it (of course) put the boot.bin file wherever it wanted (not at sector 20)
Educational Background - Important to understanding my predicament:
What the BIOS does when booting from CD is it "Unzips" the bootimg.bin file and expands it into a "Virtual Floppy" and runs the boot process off that Virtual Floppy. The VF contains cdrom drivers et al, and will kick off the rest of the CallManager installation.
The way to create a Bootable CD is to create a bootable floppy disk with all the bells and whistles on it that you use to boot the CD. Then you go over to Nero, or Roxio, or whatever burn utility you use and you say "I want to create a bootable CD". You then create your CD image as you normally would - click next - and the software will ask to see your boot floppy, which it will read and create a boot image which it then bundles into a bootimg.bin file and places it with the rest of the data you put on your CD. It then creates the Boot.bin file and places both .bin files on special places on your CD - making it bootable.
--- I can see only three solutions to the problem ---
1) Get a good copy of the CD from Cisco - I've contacted my Cisco rep and he's working on it. Cisco TAC is of no help because we purchased the hardware too long ago and the CD's aren't covered under our smartnet contract. The orignals were lost long ago and all we have are copies.
2) Get some software that will take the bootimg.bin file and use it as it is, just placing it into the right location on the CD and creating the boot.bin file. (Find the software, you get 2000 points)
3) Use some sort of software to decompose the bootimg.bin file so that I can put it back onto a floppy and recreate the boot CD that way.
4) If anyone has CallManager 3.3(2) or even 3.2, or 3.1 - All I need is the first CD. If you have a copy of the CD and you can create an .ISO image from it that I can download, you get 2000 pts.
I know, option #3 is like trying to run a sausage mill backwards to manufacture pigs. Don't even go there. But if theres a way for it to be done, I'm sure the fellow technicians here on EE will figure it out.
