I frequently need to install NT4/SP6a & IE 5.5/6.0 on PCs, and this currently means 3 (genuine!) CDs.

I want to produce a single CD from which I can do this, by stripping the unnessary alpha/mips/ppc code from the NT4 CD and adding the contents of SP6a etc as ordinary folders.

However, this means I need to extract the boot information from the NT4 CD and reapply it to the new image.

How do I go about finding out what method/emulation the NT4 CD uses to boot, and then copying this?

You should be able to grab the boot sectors with CDRWin. Couldn't you use Ghost or similar to restore the whole lot and then just change the SID for each installation??

Hopefully someone else can be of more help.

Ghost isn't an option since the machines are no where near similar.

I'm going to reply to my own question here.
This tool:
http://www.nu2.nu/bbie/
extracts the boot sector (or you can trawl through the offsets yourself: http://www.cdpage.com/Compact_Disc_Variations/bootablecdarticle.htm
).

Since I was copying the original bootable NT4 cd, I only needed to use the single boot sector, set "no emulation mode" in burner-software-of-choice (but set "number of sectors to load" to 4 because that seems to be the convention). The rest of the boot stuff is directly from the filesystem-accessible parts of the CD.

More general information on making bootable NT/2000/XP cds is available at:

http://www.nu2.nu/bootcd/