bootable cd

[jcnj6]

Hey all

Lost the use of my CD Drive, probably heat related, posted help request on Forums, and many advised an NEC ND-6650, so I ordered it,

Then my T23 crashed (possible virus),
New cd drive arrived, worked perfect (THANKS TO ALL WHO HELPED!)
BUT, Was unable to repair Win2000.
I was, however, able to install Win XP over Win2000, backed up important data using new Burner,

I then used my Restore Partition Diskette to active F11, clean installed Win2000 with F11 Restore Partition, Reinstalled my Applications, everything OK but a lot of work.

You may have guessed that I did not have any backup/restore precautions
I AM MAKING REGULAR BACKUP OF SYSTEM during install and will make regular backups. (I hope)

I made and Emergency Restore Floppy Disk from Windows Backup
All the above backups are burned on DVD's

I Installed Grissoft free AntiVirus software and went to make an Emergency Restore Diskette. Found out it requires many floppies so I tried to make a restore CD.
The new burner came with Roxio Easy burning software, and there are minimal instruction how to create bootable CD but they seem to require a pre-created boot image.

Sorry for the long story, maybe it will help someone else.

The T23 has a swappable Floppy and CD Drive
The bootable floppy will leave me with no access to the CD's or DVD's data.

So, here's the real questions . . . .

How do you make a reliable backup plan for this machine?

How do you make usable, bootable cd's or DVD's as rescue discs?

Can DVD's even be used as bootable restore discs?

Is there a presice order to create a disc (do the system files have to be in a specific location)?

Can you, dual partition a CD or DVD with a boot partition and a data partition?

I understand Full and incremental backups, is there a website/forum with comprehensive backup info with regards to the above CD/DVD and other questions?

Thanks for all who help

Rich Johnson