No Success lately so doing research

Yesterday was a bust so I am going to look into
why the image i made yestday wouldnt boot.

question that i propose.
wouldnt bart's pe cd be similar to windows xp embedded?

how are they similar how are they different?
what minimum things have to go into bootable system?
and i mean minimum.

how is the boot loader correctly placed?
i was able to make bootable virtual machine
using microsoft's virtual pc but not using
vmware.

so first question.
what minimum files makes
a system bootable and has a shell?