Niggly prob with ISO burning

Hi all. Not sure if this is the right place for this query, but here goes>

I'm trying out Avast's bootable antivirus CD (BART). As a tech, I'm getting pcs daily that are infected with the latest bugs so I need to keep up with the play. Just had a particularly tough battle with some new viruses that wouldn't even let me get into the system, so I felt it was time that I investigated a bootable antivirus prog.

Avast's BART seems pretty good, but I want to be able to update their provided ISO every few days when new virus sigs become available. Their method basically requires a rewrite of the entire ISO, using UltraISO, then burning a CD afresh.

Well, that seems a little clumsy to me; having to rewrite the entire 160MB ISO when all that's needed is to update the 14MB signature file (which is always named the same - '400.vps')

So I've been experimenting with burning the ISO file with various burning progs. Nero wasn't a lot of help, so I went to Power2Go, which I use most of the time for other burning.

This is what I've done so far:
Created a bootable CD from the Avast ISO, using Power2Go.
Booted with the CD - no probs, it ran and did its virus check.

Downloaded the latest sig file, a later and slightly larger '400.vps'
Used Power2Go to overwrite only that vps file.
Power2Go recognised the previous session and rewrote the vps in 15-20 secs.
Booted with the CD - again no probs, it ran and did its virus check.

Used Power2Go a third time to overwrite the vps again, but NO GO!
Power2Go no longer sees the previous session, so no overwrite possible.

OK, I can erase the Mitsubishi CDRW and start again, burning the complete ISO from scratch, but that doesn't explain why Power2Go balks on the third session write.

Anyone have a clue on this? Or suggest another burning app? As I said, I've tried Nero, but if anything it was more frustrating than Power2Go.

Thanks

 

Hi Masonite

Tony is so right with a small amount of data a bootable USB drive would do it!

As far as burning ISO's I think ImgBurn is the best. That is its specialty.

http://www.imgburn.com/index.php?act=download

But for a real repair disk you need to get a UBCD4Win repair CD. It is worth the reburn but it also allows you to boot from cd get Internet and download latest virus and malware sigs to the HD. These incluse Adaware Spybot and your Avast.

http://www.ubcd4win.com/

During build be sure to run Config bottom left and enable extra features or disable the ones you do not need. Enable all and expect to need DVD-R.

You also may want to google Hiren's Booot disk.

Mike

 

Guys, thanks for the response.

TonyT - as far as I know the Avast Bart AV system can only load extra data from a floppy. That's according to its rather sparse documentation. But not all pcs have a floppy drive these days, so I'm trying to set up a system that'll cope with all eventualities.

Similarly, not all systems are conducive to a USB boot, otherwise that would be a definite alternative.

mflynn: Thanks, I'll check out Imgburn, as well as the UBCD4Win repair CD. Got Hiren's 9.5 somewhere but I was kinda hankering for a real simple solution to my quest for a bootable antivirus disc. I mean, I don't even need the tools that these developers load into their progs - all I want to do is hunt bugs in DOS And then be able to update the hunting equipment in just a few minutes each day.

FProt had a great boot system a few years back. Their AV prog fitted onto one floppy to begin with. Then, as the sig base got bigger, the system needed more floppies. I seem to recall it got up to about 3 floppies before FProt pulled the plug on it.

As you can imagine, that one was REAL easy to update

To be honest, I can't see what's so difficult about turning out a product like this. Sometimes it really burns me that I know so little about software writing. Seems to me that there'd be a good market for a dedicated bootable AV system, that was easily updateable and well documented.