my current rig does not have a burner(yet) and another on my network does. the drive is shared. will this work?

Not exactly you have to burn the CD from the system with the CD Burner installed in it... you can share a CD Burner drive for reading disks in it.. you just can't burn to them.

When the network is started, can you see the files you need to backup
from the computer that does have the burner installed?

If YES, you can burn the CD from that computer, just make sure to CACHE ALL THE FILES
if you have trouble burning because most networks have some "lag" & wont keep up with the data rate.

You can also burn the CD to an image file (ISO) & then burn the real disk from the other computer.

NFS is the only way that I know of that's fast enough to use for (some) cd burning. Even with NFS, it's hit/miss though...

Tom

well i could save the iso, and just xfer across the network, but im not sure if the computer is ridden w/ virus's or not.

Before burning on that PC I'd try running the following from safe mode (Getting to safe-mode) Sysclean you'll also need the virus template file from here lpt***.zip remember to extract the contents of the zip file into the same folder as Sysclean.com

or

DrWeb CureIT

or

KASFX which is powered by the Kaspersky AV engine, you will need internet access to update it. If you haven't got net access in safe mode, update it before you use it.

If your good with the command line also try Sophos Command Line scanner this command will scan all of your hdd's SAV32CLI.EXE -F -di -remove -dn -mbr -all -zip -p=avscanlog.txt and give you a log file to review afterwards.

If you haven't got a flash drive for the above transfer them across to the infected PC and then run them.

Clean most of the infections this way and then burn the ISO and then do a scan via ubcd4win.