CD-Rs and CD-RWs

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I work from two locations using separate PCs and planned to use CD-RWs (in combination with Briefcase) as a sort of portable hard drive. However, I find that CD-RWs burned on one PC are usually unreadable or only partially readable in the other PC (ie I can read only the top two levels of files and sub-files) and I can’t edit the contents of the CD-RW disc in the other PC. One PC has a HP8210i CD-RW drive with HP’s DLA software, the other is a Plextor CD-RW drive with Roxio’s WinOn CD and Nero Burning ROM.

Possibly related is the fact that the HP drive sometimes fails to recognise that a blank CD is in the drive.

Both PCs run Windows 2000.

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Is it only a one-way problem, or do you have problems reading CD’s in each PC that have been created by the other?
I was just wondering if it may be a matter of formatting the blank CD’s in one burner, then writing to them in both (if that makes sense).

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It seems to be two-way. I can’t get anything to work reliably in the other burner. Sometimes the HP burner won’t even recognise that there’s a brand new blank CD in the burner. (Incidentally, I’ve just had the HP burner installed from my old PC as I was having the same problem with a brand new Ricoh burner in that PC, which is new, and the diagnosis from Ricoh was that the burner was faulty)

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I don’t even use my CD player. Maybe a couple of hours a week and that is straight music cds. And it is a player only. But they seem to have a six month life. I’ve gone thru four of them in the last two years. They either stop recognizing there is a disc or even worse feed sparodic info to the computer. Only answer I have found is trash em. Two of them were still under warranty which helped.

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Do you smoke? Is the PC well ventilated? Pets? Children? I know someone whose kids seem to think that the tray loader is great for bread and things (toaster?!!!?), oh and they get all kinds of crap on the CDs, like the stuff you should put on toast…
Othr things to consider are faulty power supply or power cable to the the drive.
Ewan

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Yep. To answer Lief at the same time I did clean them. Yes, I do have a cat and it is amazing how much cat fur gets inside the tower box. But vacuum, blower, cleaning discs no help.

Now the power cable I will make a note of. This one is almost a year old. If it goes soon I will try replacing the cables too. Although I think I did that with the last one as I usually use whatever comes with the package.

Anyway you people sure pointed out a lot of pitfalls about using recordable ones. Thanks.

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This is standard practice for MOST burners. Most CD_RW’s must be closed out to be read on a DIFFERENT CD reader.

DaveA I am so far behind, I think I am First
Genealogy....confusing the dead and annoying the living

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Would I be able to achieve what I want by using the same burner software on each PC and/or having the same make and model of burner plus the same software on each PC or am I whistling in the wind??

For all their shortcomings, floppies were quite useful little things weren’t they!

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“am I whistling in the wind??” YES

DaveA I am so far behind, I think I am First
Genealogy....confusing the dead and annoying the living

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What – the children?

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Yea! Lord Leif!

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