I needed some sort of boot media while fixing a PC. The first thing I considered was a USB stick but unfortunately the PC BIOS was too old to support that. Ok then let's try a CD, do I have one?
It's interesting that it didn't really cross my mind to use a floppy disk, there probably are some in a box somewhere but would they even still be readable? I certainly couldn't have easily written to one as my PC doesn't have a floppy drive - I would anticipate a 'bzrrrr, grrrrrrr, whzzzrrrrr' sound from the read head struggling to access something resembling data if I'd had a drive available. You know the noise, the sound of 'data error reading drive A:'.
As it turns out I had a handful of CDR's, still sealed in their original packaging, but there was also a CDRW. Rather than open the antique TDK and SONY recordable CD's, that must date from the late 90's, I opted for the CDRW. Let's see if this magical item, which had a brief moment in the sun at the turn of the century before USB sticks became a decent size, would function.
The CDRW was easily formatted and had a bootable ISO image written to it and booted an operating system to recover the stricken PC, and that was that for a walk down memory lane.
For official/internal use only:
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