On Thu, 7 Aug 2003, Ann Sanfedele wrote: > Anyway, today is spoken for with other chores. I does appear that I can't > just treat a > CD like a floppy on the A drive though. The really bad thing is my friend > unhooked my > D drive so I cant backup stuff to the zip nor can I get at what Ive already > backed up... > A big misunderstainding on my part was the idea that I could use a cd as a way > to backup > directories, as well as making discs to send out.
Ignore the naysayers, you can do all that. It may not work as efficently as youw ish, but you can do it anyway. In order to write to the drive as if it were a froppy, you need to install a packetwriting program (I think that's the term for it, its been awhile since I paid attention). The one I can name off the top of my head is DirectCD, but judging from the price you paid, I bet you just bought a CenDyne drive last weekend, which as you mentioned comes with Nero. One of the programs that was optional in teh setup was a packetwriting program which works like DirectCD. I can't tell you how that one works, but I can tell you that DirectCD used to wait for you to put a CD in, and it would just mount it up as a regular drive. You copy, it writes. I don't think it was really all that efficent, but that's how it did its job. Of course, with a once-writable, you filled the disk and moved on. With re-writes, you'd have to erase teh whole thing. ITs not nice and selective, like a froppy or a zip drive. Now, you can just put a CD in, start Nero Express and launch the wizard to create a data CD. Copy your stuff over (again, I can't speak for Nero Express, I used to use EZ CD Creator from Adaptec, or Toast for the Mac), which will probably be a matter of drag and drop. That bar on the bottom? It tells you how much space you have left on your disc. When you fill it up, you just hit the record button. When you write a disc, you can: Write a session, leave disc open: You can keep writing stuff to the disc, but yes, some drives won't like an open disc. Some won't mind, either. Write a session, close disc: WEll, like teh above, but it closes the disc. Just about all drives have no problem with that. Disc at once: Writes the data, closes the disc, never turns the laser off teh whole way. More or less like writing a session, closing the disc, but there's no gaps between tracks...which really only becomes an issue when you're recording music (or, perhaps, dealing with antique cd readers). When you're backing up your files, just write sessions and leave the disc open. If you're sending a CD to a friend, just disc-at-once or close the disc when done. Unless, again, they have an ancient CD-rom drive, there should be no problems. Finally, giant directory structures, etc? Yeah, no doubt CDRW drives vomit on that sort of thing, but I wouldn't be concerned with it..unless you have incredibly nested directories, which probably does violate some sort of iso9660 rule. :) -- http://www.infotainment.org <-> more fun than a poke in your eye. http://www.eighteenpercent.com <-> photography and portfolio.
