If you're viewing this page, you've probably tried a few things to resolve a key BigOven installation setting and it's still not working.  You may be getting a "BigOven cannot locate a critical file" message on startup.  Don't worry; these are pretty straightforward to resolve. 

Here's how to go into the settings of the program to manually restore them to what they should be.  Before beginning, make sure BigOven for Windows is not running.  Exit out of the program.

1)  File Structure -- The first step is to make sure your BigOven file structure is shown as below.

BigOven is very particular, by design, about where it needs to find your recipe boxes and data files.  This is because we don't want the program to have to search your entire hard drive to build a list of all available recipe boxes, which would take a long time, and would be necessary every time you add or remove a recipe box file.

The file structure of your My BigOven Recipes folder must look like this (give or take a few recipe box folders):

Note that each recipe box folder (e.g., like the one called "Crockpot" above) MUST contain a recipe box file of the same name (e.g., "crockpot.crb") as well as a subfolder called "Pictures" that holds all the JPG images for that recipe box.

BigOven also doesn't want to see any single apostrophes, terminating spaces, or special characters in those recipe box folder and file names.  E.g., a recipe box and file folder called "Steve's Salad Recipes" is sure to cause trouble.  If you've got this problem, use Windows Explorer to manually modify the file folder names so that they are only using letters, numbers, and spaces.  Make sure the folder name matches the root name of the .CRB file.  (e.g., we might change the folder to Steves Salad and the recipe box that lives in that folder to Steves Salad.crb).

Every single recipe box you have MUST reside underneath the "RBox" folder, which is in turn underneath the "My BigOven Recipes" folder.

Two other critical files are called "support.csy" and "system.mdw", both of which MUST reside in the subfolder called "Data", above.

Where is "My BigOven Recipes" located, anyway?  Well, your "My BigOven Recipes" folder, can, technically, reside anywhere on your PC, but we strongly recommend you place it under your PC's "Shared Documents" folder.  In early versions of BigOven, we installed "My BigOven Recipes" to the personal "My Documents" folder of the Windows user who was installing it, but from version 1.8.5 on, we are installing it, by default, to your "Shared Documents" folder.  (This was both for Designed for Windows XP logo compliance but also to allow Windows XP users to share the same recipe boxes, shopping lists, meal calendars, etc. on the same PC.)

If your hard-drive is named "C:\", this means the full path to the "My BigOven Recipes" location is:

C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\My BigOven Recipes 

2)  Make sure your Windows REGISTRY settings are correct. 

Now, Step 1 above talked about the file structure on your PC, but there's a little more to go.  You need to make sure that BigOven knows where to find the key folders and files it needs. 

The pointers to the file locations BigOven needs are stored in the Windows Registry.

WARNING:  The Windows Registry is the place where all your computer's installed applications, not just BigOven -- hey, even Windows itself! -- saves key settings.  For this reason, be very careful that you ONLY view and modify the keys below.  Follow the instructions below VERY carefully and you'll have no problem.

Here's how BigOven works.  When it loads, it looks in the Windows Registry for the following file locations:

• The recipe box to load on startup
• Where to find the "My BigOven Recipes" folder
• Where to find the "support.csy" file, which is necessary for loading
• Where to find the "system.mdw" file

Let's make sure that the Windows registry tells BigOven the correct full path to each file above.  Once we do that, we're done, and BigOven should load just fine.

Run REGEDIT.EXE as follows:

• From the Start button, choose "Run..."
• Type REGEDIT and press return

The Windows Registry Editor should launch, which looks like this:

d)  Navigate through the folders as follows:

Double-click "HKEY_CURRENT_USER" to expand that file

Double-click "Software"

Double-click "SDMVentures"

Double-click "BigOven"

There!  You're looking at the place where BigOven stores the key file locations.  The full path to this "registry key" is \HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SDMVentures\BigOven. 

What you want to do is verify that the following keys are truly correct and reflect your system:

There are a lot more keys in there, but we don't recommend modifying them directly. 

Make sure that the four registry keys above have the full filepath to the file.  You can modify them by double-clicking on them, entering the correct file path, and pressing OK.

The four above -- the file locations -- are the critical ones.  (If they are not set right, BigOven will give you a prompt upon loading that it needs you to locate your My BigOven Recipes folder, etc.)

Once you've done that, you can exit out of the registry editor, and you should be able to launch BigOven.

If you are still getting a "Cannot Load" message, and you have double-checked that the file locations above are correct, you might want to try re-installing the Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC).  If you are getting a "Cannot find System.MDW" message, see this post in our FAQ section.