How to create bootable CD

See this post for instructions for how to take stuff that's on a bootable DVD and placing it on a USB drive that's bootable.

A USB Thumbdrive is just a hard drive, and if it's got the right boot files and the BIOS supports booting from an external USB hard drive it will work fine.

To understand what makes a CD or DVD drive bootable see this post on the El Torito (CD-ROM standard).

To create a bootable CD-ROM you need to prepare the disc. You will need to add Bootfiles to the disc. Here is a simple description of how to do this. You will even find a link there to download the correct bootimage. I did this 3-4 times yet and always used this short howto and the bootimage linked there. Your CD-ROM will appear as drive "A:" after booting. There also is a way to do this with some other images, which provide CD-ROM support, but I never did that, so I can´t tell you how good this works.