How to rewrite CD-RW

Hi, all

I was a long time Wintel/Linux user. However, that has changed since last Friday. I received my first Mac - TiBook G4/667/Combo. It is a beautiful machine and OS X is fantastic.

Although I still have Windows machines around, I am almost exclusively on OS X, except printing. My office is Windows network. I have used DAVE to get on windows network, but I can't print from Mac to Xerox Document Centre 230 on the office network.

Second, since my TiBook has DVD/CD-RW combo, so I decide to test the CD-RW. Once I use Finder to burn the CD-RW disc, I could not over it. How can I reformat the same CD-RW to overide the old content?

Thanks

:confused:

bump. I would like to know also. for os X and in toast. i had a CDRW but could rewrite it it toast, got an error.

I can't test this at the moment, but I recall seeing something a while back about being able to erase a CD-RW using the Disk Utility in your utilities folder. woth a shot

Correct. Disk utility allows you to erase a disk. This may be the dumbest location for this feature. I understand, it makes sense, disk utility. But what average user would you tell to go to the Utility Folder and tell a user to launch Disk Utility.

Work in a school and I just had to delete this, because I just couldn't take the chance.

dw9

Thanks a lot, Disk utility works great.

BTW, anybody knows how to printer to Xerox Document Centre 230 on MS network (it is a network printer/fax/copier)?

It is a great machine and great OS!!!!


:confused: and :)

While this solves the problem of how to delete a disk, what if one wants to simply add to a disk, or save an update version of a file to a disk?

Then you'll have to either write another session (assuming you didn't close the sesion when you burned the disc) or invent your own CD/RW-type format, because that's simply not how CD/RW works. You can't just change an individual file on it.

Unless you use Windows.

Oh really? I've yet to see, let alone hear of a program that can do this (unless, of course, it's simply erasing the disc and rewriting the whole thing with the new/changed file(s)). I'm interested--could you show me a program that can do this? I've certainly never heard of one.

When I first got my 2x2x6 CD-RW drive back in 1999, I got Easy CD Creator along with it. This also came with DirectCD. I don't know how long it was around before then. I played with it for a while, but on a 2x writer it was plenty slow. That drive could only reliably burn at 1x anyway. It wastes about 200MB of the disc though, so you end up with a ~400MB floppy, essentially.

There is an option on toast under recorder to erase, this will wipe clean the CDRW. As for your Xerox, can you print by IP using LPR and a generic printer?

Is there any way of using the standard OS X burning (ie, in the Finder rather than using Toast) to write a multisession disc?

In my office, all printers have their own IP. I simply choose the printer by its DNS name or IP. It sets up as LPR. Choose the right driver. GO...

Go nagging your IT people, should be easy to fix.

Sophus

On my B&W G3, Toast 5.1(release) is the only way to erase my CDRW (Lite-On 16102B). Apple software chokes and dies in the attempt (it should at least fail gracefully).

Why a CDRW doesn't have erase in its contextual menu is beyond me.

Mike

I just started running Win XP at work, and you can replace a single file, even on a CD-R...I have no idea how. One interesting default difference between XP and X is that XP leaves the disk open and the explorer/finder shows there is available space, whereas X closes the disk, and the explorer/finder says there is no available space.

This isn't a "Windows" feature. It's a feature of an ISO 9660 multi-session CD. Basically the way it works is that the table of contents can be written several times. The computer only looks at the latest-written one. If you omit the listing of a file, it's essentially "deleted".

In this way, you can add files, delete them, even move them around. Since the table of contents is separate from the actual data, you don't have to write the actual data again unless you need a different copy.

Pretty efficient. If someone wants a reference for this info, I'll see what I can do about digging one up.

As for the Mac, I have no idea how you'd go about using the Finder to write a multi-session disk.

DirectCD was around for Mac OS 9 for quite a while, too. I've heard that there are some UNIX apps that can do this as well. Maybe if someone ported one...