Page 1 of Probably a really stupid question but...

I`m having trouble with my slave drive and have been told by the shop I bought it from to try eitherMaxtor`s powermax or IBM`s drive fitness test, so I`ve downloaded them both, made floppy disks and windows XP doesn`t boot from them so I figured I`d make the CD`s, so I downloaded the iso`s and for the life of me can`t figure out how to burn them to CD, the IBM one doesn`t seem to be anything like an iso, just a rar file full of folders and the Maxtor one has two bin files on but whenever I try to burn them as an image it tells me `unexpected file format`.

So can anyone give me instruction on how to actually make the CD`s? it would be greatly appreciated.
Rev

Can you tell me what problems you are experiencing with your slave drive? I may be able to help without you having to run all the drive diagnostic tests, etc.

Your PC can boot up a floppy by setting it as the first boot device in the BIOS.

What ISO files do you mean and what are they for? If you want to put an ISO CD image onto a blank CD you need special software to do that such as ISOBuster or CloneCD.

the drive is freezing as am trying to access it sometimes, it`ll be fine for a sec and then stop responding and i`ll get the `program is not responding` box. It was doing this a month or so ago and a it turned out my drive had totally failed, so I want to run the diagnostics to see if it finds anything.

The iso files are to make a bootable disk for the drive fitness tests.

Rev

Oh I see. In that case, it is worth using the diagnostics. The ISOs can be burned using the programs I mentioned or using Nero too.

The diagnostic software will tell you how serious the hard drive failure is. If it seems like a few damaged sectors (which looks like it is the case as Windows will hang on bad sectors) then you can still use the rest of the hard by reformatting it as this will mark the bad sectors as unusuable. However, I don`t recommend using the hard disc much longer as this is typical of impending failure, particularly if you have important data.