How to boot from a CD in windows 98?

Booting from CD is more about the BIOS settings than the OS. Are you sure it is set to boot from a CD before booting from the hard drive or floppy?

Is the acronis disk a bootable disk?

Zaku is correct, if your CD isn’t setup as an actual bootdisk then your system will bypass it and boot as normal. Just burning Acronis files to it will not work if it isn’t formatted properly.
Check here for the files you’ll need to make it into a bootable cd.

Well I know it is bootable, I have fixed over 20 computers this week with it. I think that 98 can’t take it, it partially loaded on one but then gave an error.

Windows really shouldn’t play into whether or not a disk boots. Generally speaking, when you direct the computer to boot from a disk instead of the hard drive (for windows), the disk is loaded into memory. Windows plays no role in booting from a CD/DVD. Now, while it’s booting, there are all kinds of hardware checks that are going along with the booting process. Given that you were able to get the computer to start booting from the disk, but that you ran into errors during boot, I would think that one of two things are going on. Either the hardware you are trying to boot from the disk is incompatible read, too old, the most likely scenario with windows 98 or defective, or the disk has errors or is scratched to the point of unreadability.

The disk must be too new, because it has no scratches.

I expect it would be that the hardware is failing to boot from CD (which might not be a feature of the hardware), rather than that the disk is too new.

why are you running win 98?

It is some ancient laptops I got and want to fool around with LOL