...windos/dos CD? i don't use floppies any more and need to boot from something other than my hard disk

Well, the best way is to look at whatever program you have for burning CDs and see if it has an option to create a bootable CD. If you can't find it, or use Windows itself to burn CDs, then it's a little more complicated.Note: If you find that booting from CD doesn't work, you may have to adjust your BIOS setting to allow your machine to boot from CD.If you want to boot to windows: the easiest way is probably to go here: http://www.nu2.nu/bootcd/ and download a utility that will do it for you. There are instructions there depending on what type of boot you want.If you don't trust using a third party utility, Microsoft has some instructions here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/167685/EN-US/ . This process is not very straightforward though.If you just need to get into your filesystem and poke around, you might consider booting a different OS. For example, http://www.freedos.org/ (FreeDOS) and http://www.knoppix.net/ (Knoppix Linux) may do what you want. For these, you can download ISO images and burn bootable CDs.