EDDIE MAINTENANCE FAQ

I'm having trouble burning the ISO. Or, I cant open the ISO.

ISO's are images of a CD. They are not designed for simply burning to a CD like you do with regular data on your computer to back it up for example. Your CD burning program _has_ to have an option to "open" or "select" an ISO to burn to disk. For example, many people have Nero Express that came with their CDrom drive. If using NERO Express, Select Disk Image or Saved Project, Open [find the ISO file], Next, Burn at the lowest speed.

UltraISO is a program I also use very often. To burn an ISO with UltraISO, select File, Open, Find the ISO, Open, Then select Tools, Burn CD DVD Image, Select a low burn speed, Select Write Method Disk At Once, then burn. I'm currently using UltraISO version 8.6.1 free trial and it's been working fine.

I've also used MagicISO 5.4. Select Tools, Burn CD/DVD with ISO, Select CD/DVD Image File, Open, CD/DVD Write Speed select lowest, Burnit!, Wait until the CD drawer opens, Close the program.

UltraISO and MagicISO can be downloaded as shareware [functional] from the Bootdisk.Com Essential Utilities Page under CD-R/CD-RW/DVD Section, ISO's .

Also keep in mind that ISOs are NOT meant to be opened, they are designed to be simply burned to a CD with an ISO burning app or function of your regular burning program. Perhaps the easiest and smallest and least invasive all all the ISO burning programs is burncdcc.zip, also available for free download and fully functional from the Bootdisk.Com Essential Utilities Page under CD-R/CD-RW/DVD Section, ISO's, BurnCDCC.

I tried to use wipe to write zeros to my hard drive and typed wipe 1 and got an error message and a list of what they mean but no joy.

Typing wipe 0 tells the program to clean your FIRST physical hard drive. In other words, computers start counting drives starting at zero, NOT 1.

Typing wipe 1 tells the program to clean your SECOND physical hard drive. You'll get one of several error messages if:

1. There is no second physical hard drive, or:
2. The second physical hard drive is bad

One way I usually can tell if a hard drive is bad is try to use fdisk on it. If fdisk stalls on the verification part then the drive "may" be bad. If fdisk stalls and then you try to wipe the drive perhaps to remove bad partition data and wipe fails then the drive is most likely toast.

However, before you pronounce a drive dead set it up as the only drive in your system and use the drive diagnostic in the Windows\harddisk folder. Then try fdisk and/or wipe again.

I made your bootable cd I can see the files on it so I know I burned the image correctly but it wont boot. Why?

Here is the procedure [checklist] I use when having problems creating bootable CDs from ISOs and thus far, has always worked.

1. Make sure your background applications are closed. Those are the programs you have running in the background and can see in your system tray.
2. Burn at a low speed, 12X to 24X
3. Make sure its a final burn eg [no further writing] aka [finalize cd]. There is usually a checkmark to tick.
4. Make sure that in your BIOS the CDrom drive you will boot from is set to AUTO
5. Make sure that in your BIOS - Boot Order - its set to boot from CD First
6. Bootable CDs want to be started in the Master CDrom drive if you have 2 drives. It wont boot off the second or Slave CDrom drive.
7. Use a standard CD-R to burn, not a DVD or RW disk.

Also note that the CDrom drive you are tying to boot from may not support bootable CDs of ANY flavor, ours or others. For example, if your CDrom drive cant boot from an XP CD [which is bootable] than it most likely wont be able to boot from any other bootable CD. So try the disk in another, newer PC as a double-check.

I am having problems downloading the file. Any tips?

Perhaps you have IE's temporary internet files settting to low, like perhaps 50 megs. If so, then you wont be able to download a 120 meg file as it has to go to cache first before it's written to your download folder.

Or, often people who want the MultiTask Suite are trying to download it on PCs that are already damaged by spyware, trojans, or viruses which will often interfere with larger downloads when using IE. So, try using another web browser to download the file which most often works. If not, use another PC to doadload the file. Then you can burn it as any other file to cd to save it, OR, even make the ISO on the "working PC", then use it to fix your "broken computer".

Perhaps you're on a dialup account and are timing out. In that case try a download manager or a pinger, both are free if you look around.

The download may be corrupted. Delete all windows temp and tmp files. Delete your internet cache files. Create a new folder, try again to download to the newly created folder.

You may need to create a new folder and tell the download to go to that folder.

You may have to turn off your anti-virus during the download, turn it on again once the download is finished, as some of the files on the download may give false positives with your anti-virus.

My anti-virus tells me there is a problem/virus in the file and wont save the downoad

Some anti-virus programs tell you CORRECTLY that there is a password finding tool in the download. It's not any type of malware.

Will I be able to run chkdsk with your program or is there a part of your program that will scan the disk and check and correct for errors? There's errors on the hard drive and I need a boot cd to access the NTFS and check for errors.

Yes, after booting go to the dos/ntfs folder in R:, run ntfs4dos, and the special chkdsk for ntfs is there for NTFS drives.

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