[hawthorn]

Hi all. I hope I'm posting this to the right forum!

When I want to save a copy of my data (mainly word docs) I simply write them to the cd-rw. However, a few months after doing that I decided to save them again, as some had changed, and more files had been added. So I just copied over the My Docs folder.

I would have thought that it would simply update the earlier files, and maybe it did that, but somehow I ended up with 2 copies of everything. Maybe I wrote them twice or something. There were also mp3 and midi files, with the result that the cd-rw is now FULL !

The following questions come to mind:

1 Can you delete files from the cd-rw? I tried and couldnt, it said it was "read only".

2 Is it possible to re-arrange, drag and drop, etc on the cd-rw i.e. to tidy it up, as it were?

Also a strange thing has just happened with my cd-rw. I load it up, right click, go to properties, and it says

Used 542 kb Free 254 mb

But when I right click the folder on the cd-rw (My music and Docs) it gives:

Size 349 mb, which is more realistic.

I just inserted another cd-rw, which is absolutely full, and right clicking gives a size of only 203mb !!?

Wonder whats going on?

KC

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Generally, CD-RW's are re-writable, but not in the same way that a floppy or hard drive is. A CD-RW must be erased completely before it's written to, or data the data is simply added. It will not overwrite previous versions of files.

The exception to this is drives with Mt Ranier support. These drives can be written to like a floppy drive, but Windows doesn't support Mt Rainer, so even if your drive supports it, you need to have a third party program running in the background for it to work.

1 Can you delete files from the cd-rw? I tried and couldnt, it said it was "read only".

No. You can only erase the entire disc.

2 Is it possible to re-arrange, drag and drop, etc on the cd-rw i.e. to tidy it up, as it were?

No.

Wonder whats going on?

If your disc is "finalized", you won't be able to write to it. It may appear full, even though there is capacity left.

[admin]

Generally, CD-RW's are re-writable, but not in the same way that a floppy or hard drive is. A CD-RW must be erased completely before it's written to, or data the data is simply added. It will not overwrite previous versions of files.

The exception to this is drives with Mt Ranier support. These drives can be written to like a floppy drive, but Windows doesn't support Mt Rainer, so even if your drive supports it, you need to have a third party program running in the background for it to work.

1 Can you delete files from the cd-rw? I tried and couldnt, it said it was "read only".

No. You can only erase the entire disc.

2 Is it possible to re-arrange, drag and drop, etc on the cd-rw i.e. to tidy it up, as it were?

No.

Wonder whats going on?

If your disc is "finalized", you won't be able to write to it. It may appear full, even though there is capacity left.