Free CD/DVD ROM burning software?

I need to create a bootable CD but can't afford to get Nero at the moment. Windows XP's built-in CD/DVD burning can't create a bootable disk, right?

Are there any decent freeware apps out there that can create a bootable CD?

How's about CDBurnerXP? I used it successfully many times until I got Nero pre-installed on my new computer.

I second CDBurnerXP. I use it on my tablet even though it came with a copy of Nero. For some reason Nero needed DirectX installed, so I figured it had become bloated since last time I used it. :)

I'll take a look. Thanks.

Infra Recorder? (Commonly used for Ubuntu install disks)

Third vote for CDBurnerXP... I used it to make a few linux CDs and some disk wiper CDs.

ImgBurn is pretty good.

I use and like ImgBurn as well.

Only tried CDburnerXP so far which seems really good but I'm having trouble creating a bootable CD. It asks me to provide a boot image, which I dont have and dont know where to get it from.

I've been told to make an ISO file of the disk image so I downloaded an ISO maker but that asks me to provide a boot image too! Where the heck to I get this elusive boot image from? Grrrr.

Bootable CD's are in actual fact a floppy disk image stored on the CD, so you make a floppy then create an ISO from it with something like DiskImage. if it's an MSDOS floppy you choose to make then dont forget to include MCDEX and all that mallarky as amusingly MSDOS still needs drivers to access the CD *ironic sigh* even when booting off it...

EDIT: Yes i'm well aware how rediculous that all sounds.

I tried using a floppy boot image but it didn't work.

Basically, the problem is, I don't really know what the hell I'm doing. :/

What you need is a floppy disk that boots up and gives you access to everything you want, then you make that floppy disk into a disk image file, I think .iso, which you can do with a free piece of kit called DiskImage (mind you I havnt used that since Windows 95, no idea if its still around but there will be others). You then specify that iso file as your boot image on the CD.

Window's cdburn.exe for writing CDs, and dvdburn.exe for writing DVDs.
Never had any failures. They are both free and included in the Windows 2003 resourse kit which you can download from microsoft's web page.

@Banshee - nice.

Banshee, I need the boot image in .img/.ima format.

Anyway, I've given up on this task as a dead loss, now.