PCB Forum

I set up the burner and slapped a new CD RW and it told me it needed formatting. This damn process takes 50-90 mins per disc. Is this right?? Surely thats a bit of a piss take or have I just been stupid and bought non formatted discs? Dont remember seeing any pre-formatted ones there though. [img]images/smiles/icon_confused.gif[/img]

Only CD-RW's need to be formatted and that is because you can treat them like mini HD's meaning you can both write to them and delete from them. RW stands for rewritable. Regular CD?s (CD-R?s) can only be recorded on once and not rewritten.

No CD-R's come preformatted. When you copy to a CD-R it does the formatting at the same time, you simply choose to leave it open (a process which allows you to write additional information at a later time, but doesn't allow for immediate access of the data until the CD is closed) or close it (you cannot add any more data to the CD, but you can use the CD in a device to read the data immediately afterwards).

I think few people use CD-RW?s. I never have. Stick with CD-R?s. Besides, CD-RW?s can only be read in CD-RW drives, meaning that if you burn music to a CD-RW you won?t be able to play it in your CD player.

[ 19 June 2001: Message edited by: TheLastKamikaze ]

I use CD-RWs religously. The CD player in my truck reads MP3s or audio on CD-RWs

They're also good for backing up data. I rarely ever do backups on CD-Rs, you just burn your data on them, and then when it's time to do your next backup, you have to use another CD (instead of writing over your old data)

Only when I know I'm not going to want to change the cd, I use CD-Rs. Those cases mostly include audio CDs, and sometimes rom CDs.

I've never been told that I had to format a CD-RW, what brand CD-RW did you buy? It takes a long time to fully erase the data from one, I know that. It physically erases ALL the data. You can also do a 'quick erase' which just erases the TOC, which fools the CD drive into thinking the cd is empty. A quick erase only takes about 1 minute.

Yeah its weird, I burned a file to one of these CD-RWs after the DirectCD (or something like that) formatted it simply using windows explorer as the interface which is the way it told me to do it. I think the formatting made the disc only readable from that drive cos when I put the disc in my cd-rom it couldn't read it.

I started using some Adaptec cd burning software that also came with the burner and it didnt have to format the cd first (this was a new cd as the other one is dead). It asked me to que up the files I wanted to copy and got on with the burning. When it was finished it ejected the disc and it worked in the other drive. I only copied a zip onto the disc and didnt have enough time to see whether it would simply keep writing after the last used point. Spose I'll find out soon enough.

The CDs are Memorex CD-RWs but I want to get some CD-Rs for stuff I know I'm NOT gonna be changing.

the catch using directCD is when your donw with it, you have to put a TOC(table of contents) so it can be red on ALL computers.(actually all cdr's need to have it once done).i found that directCD is UNreliable of doing this and i lost 2 TDK cd's from this after it tried to repair it.

Yeah, I've used DirectCD before, and I lost a couple cd's because of it. I recommend using Nero for all-purpose burning (data backup cds, audio cds)

I'm pretty sure you can get Nero off of Gnutella

@!#?@! Memorex CD-RW's. Lost a few of those treating them like a HD. Still not even sure of what I lost, since these discs were never labelled. EZcd's disc@once (no preformatting needed) feature worked well with 'em, though...but since this feature closes the disc, it kinda defeats the purpose of using them in the first place. Switched over to CD-R & haven't had a problem since (and they are cheaper anyway).
BTW some CDrom drives have problems reading CD-R's, so I figure some CD players must also.

--------------------

"@!#?@!" - Q*Bert

[ 28 June 2001: Message edited by: Nukey Shay ]

Yeah shitloads of CD players have problems reading CDRWs

I think I'll have a look for some TDK CDRs soon as I've had excellent results at work using them and have not lost a disc or even a file a single time!