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Look, if you want anything at all to be bootable, you have to start with either a boot floppy or a bootable image file sitting on your drive. It’s pretty straightforward: once you've laid out the contents of your CD, you just navigate to the settings where they give you the option to load a floppy disk or a boot image, select that, and you're done. It works perfectly fine on my machine every single time. The bottom line is that you need to make sure you're loading a floppy containing those specific boot files—or an image file that actually includes them—directly into Nero. If those files are legitimate and correctly formatted, there is absolutely no way you can mess this up.
There is actually one more avenue you could explore, which involves a software called Passware. Now, it isn't free, though I suppose there are always ways to circumvent paying for things if one is inclined to do so. It’s a bit of a technical headache to set up, but it is virtually guaranteed to strip away any password you're facing. Alternatively, there is a much more straightforward method using the command line after you've booted from a Windows XP installation CD, but the specific steps have slipped my mind—I'm sure there's an instructional guide somewhere online for it. With this Passware approach, the trick is to create a bootable floppy disk through the program and then boot the machine using that Windows XP media. Once the Windows XP boot process begins, you hit F6, which allows you to load the file from the floppy, similar to how you'd handle SATA drives. You proceed with the boot, select the appropriate partition, and simply reset the password to 12345. From there, you just log in using the "Administrator" account with the password 12345. Once you're in, you head straight to the Control Panel, navigate to the user settings, and wipe out the password that was giving you such grief under your own account. And that's really all there is to it.
Honestly, if you're looking for a real solution, my suggestion is simple: grab a heavy metal pipe about twenty inches long and give that computer a good, solid whack from end to end. I guarantee all your passwords will instantly reset themselves to four zeros.😬 😬