Well... Yeah. That's what made me really tough to beat when I was an amusement/vending tech. And gunsmith. And machinist. And transmission R & R mechanic. Hydraulic engineer. And.. well.
I was generally more stubborn than what I was working on. Drove my bosses nuts. But I always had *other* companies trying to hire me away all the time, too- so it worked both ways. A rep for fixing it *right* was worth it.
The JOAT in my profile stands for Jack Of All Trades- electronics and computers I just liked best.
And I lucked out on the EAZ FIX, the ghost space in the reg code box tossed up the 'invalid key' error, and after looking closer at the subdirectories I waited, and the horror stories started rolling in...
Since I have a Ghost image of the system partition and regular differential backups done by Cobian 8, I'd have been a lot better off than lots of others- but it would have ticked me off anyway.
I didn't get to BurnAware- some of the stuff I found I didn't download, and then I ordered them by how many steps each looked like they would take. And win9x compatible went last.
I started on InfraRecorder, as that 'looked' closest to the nero interface, and it pretty much ate up all the time between.
I made up a standard (for me) freeware compilation of 4000 or so files, 4.35 gb- and threw it in headfirst.
Which gave me my first qualms, as when I said 'go', it started building an "image" rather than initializing the burner. looked like it'd take a while, so I went and found something else to do.
(best guess is it builds an iso, basically, under a different name- and I never did find out where)
First error point was that unlike Nero, if a file/directory name comes out too long for the spec, it can't rename- it just gives up. so I came back in a couple of hours and it had bailed out about 3 minutes in. grr. rename, restart.
Next it ran out of space (apparently when it does, it removes the part-built file so I couldn't ID the partition) building the image. another large block of time.
Then I had to call a break to record (capture) 4 hours of tennis the wife couldn't stay awake to watch. (playback is done on her Pogo computer, but the capture box is on mine)
Third time I think it choked on the number of files. So I built an ISO. And first it told me (what a crock) my recorder didn't support Track-At-Once, only Session-At-Once, then complained it couldn't set realtime priority.
It burned that ok, but by that time *I* was about burned out on *it*, too. I noticed the starburn icon after I uninstalled InfraRecorder.
I use Revo Uninstaller, [ http://www.revouninstaller.com/ ] (hmm, looks like I need to update it) it looks for leftovers, registry *and* file, lets me clean up at uninstall time. Handy, that.
anyway, the starburn datarecord wizard did fine, so I have something to fall back on if I don't find a better freeware alternative.
I'd prefer being able to add an entire compilation at once, as that's how I build them, in volume-label named subdirectories, with 2 different-format MD5 hashfiles to double-check burns in that directory, and all the rest in folders below that.
That way once verified I can delete the files recorded in one step. It also allows me to check the media durability down the road, too, since my volume names include the date.
