OSDev.org

Hello, I am very new to OS development, and I understand the basic theory, however I have never tried to make my own OS, I know quite a few programming languages, and have always wanted to make my own OS, so when I stumbled across these forums and the wiki a few days ago, it was like a dream come true.

Anyway, back to the question, as I am very new to this I am going to work my way through the babystep tutorials to give me an idea of the very basics. However, I have been unable to get a testable OS up and running as the tutorials all say to test off a floppy disk, and my computer does not have a floppy disk reader attatched. I am also unable to install a utility such as virtualbox, as my dad (who has the admin rights for the computer (he set the computer up for me when I was much younger, and still hasn't got round to giving me an admin account yet )) is away. So what I want to do is make my OS run off a cd instead, and I am not quite sure how to go about this, could I just write the boot.bin file to a cd, or is there some other steps or more code I have to add?

You can make a CD emulate a floppy, so if you already have a booting floppy image, this should be pretty trivial: http://wiki.osdev.org/El-Torito

You could also try booting of a USB stick. You may require access to the BIOS to make this work though, so I hope your dad did not set a password there?

Thankyou the first tip worked perfectly, and thankyou also for the very swift replies, and I'm sorry I took ages to get back to you, I've been very busy with school.

Emulating a cd as a floppy worked really well, and I now have the first version of my os up and running.

Well, if you're running Windows, you could get a precompiled qemu from here which doesn't need to be installed. Also, there is Bochs portable. Otherwise, there are easy ways to get a local admin account
Always burning your OS to a CD is going to make debugging very hard.

My dad's back now and got me qemu, and I ws running linux anyway, but thnx