I just followed your direction for a bootable CD drive without any floppies and it worked like a champ!

My one issue is the version of Ghost I have has a ghost.exe file that is 1.4megs.  Obviously too big to include on the boot dist.

I managed to find an older version of Ghost (version 7) where the ghost.exe was ony 600 or so KB's.  Unfortunately, when booting my image with this file, it says I need a newer version of ghost to open the file.

I'm learning about boot disks (not having grown up needing to do so), is there a good remedy for this?  I'm trying to find a way to just have the ghost.exe on another disk and swap them out, but it doesn't seem that the dos file system will recognise the second CD.

Robert

Ok, Ok, so I'm answering my own post.  No biggie....I do it all the time.
Us old folks are like that..... we talk to ourselves a lot.

After answering the question, "how can I make a bootable flash drive without a floppy", many times, I finally committed the whole process to a single text file.  Here's that file.

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What do I need, to make my Flash Drive boot my PC?

First you need a USB Flash Drive.
A small one, 256 or less, will work fine since it's actually replacing a floppy disk.
You can even make a Flash Memory Card bootable.

Then you need the little program from HP to make that flash drive bootable.
Here is a link to download that program.
http://www.box.net/shared/static/nkibqo9jvs.exe

This program is from HP, but the original download page is no longer active.

When the downloaded program runs it installs as a program, into your hard drive.
Then when you run the program from your Programs menu, it asks you where you want it to get the DOS boot files.

Three files are required:
Command.com
IO.sys
MSDOS.sys

These three files can be downloaded in a zip file here:

http://www.box.net/shared/v8r8ogyutp

The HP file is ready to run as soon as you download it and install it, but the DOS files had to be zipped up in a single package for storage on the internet server for eventual downloading.

The file you will download is actually, "MSDos.exe", a self extracting file containing the three DOS system files.
Drop that downloaded file into a new folder on your desktop and just click the file to start the auto-expansion process.

Then when you run the HP program to make your Flash Drive bootable and it asks you where to get the DOS boot files, point it to that folder with the three dos files in it.

Once your Flash drive is bootable to a DOS prompt, you can put Ghost 2003 or whatever you want on it.  Some of the programs I've put on my own Bootable Flash Drive are, Ghost 2003, NTFS4DOS, Memtest86, and Spinrite 6.
Other programs that could be added include "Partition Magic 8" and other HD management software.

There are other processes to make a Flash Drive bootable, but I've tried to make the whole process as simple as possible for the novice.

I've tested the above process here by downloading the files and  making a SD Flash Card bootable.
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I hope that helps someone, somewhere to create their own bootable flash drive, from which they can burn their own Bootable CD.

Happy New Year Everyone!

The Shadow