How to create a bootable CD for Acronis True Image

It just isn't working. I make the files, I copy them over, but it’s not booting. What's the point?

It says right there in the bottom right corner: "Create Bootable Rescue Media." Honestly, if everything actually works the way it's supposed to, it’ll be bootable.

I burn the disc, run the thing, files get saved, but then what? Not bootable. Just another wasted CD down the drain. Should I go with safe or full this time?

Safe or full?

Wait, wait... what do you mean "safe or full"?

Look, when I click to make a bootable CD, I hit NEXT and then this pops up:

Since I’ve got Disc Director from Acronis, I just make one bootable CD that handles everything at once.

I hit NEXT,
And that's when you get these options:
Floppy
CD
ISO image
RIS server

A floppy is way too small for this. If the direct CD burning option gives you any trouble, just create an ISO and burn it using Nero.

I tried doing the exact same thing. Only difference? I burned it to a CD. Shut the PC down, set the BIOS to boot from the disc, then fired it back up. But nothing. It won't read the damn CD at all—just skips right past it and loads Windows straight up anyway.

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.

Finally got a bootable CD working. No clue what was tripping me up at home, but everything worked perfectly on the first try here at the office. The only difference is I used a CD-RW 🙂
today.