Wow, you have touched the tip of a huge, huge iceberg.
There are 2 totally different ways to write to optical media (CD-R or
CD-RW). They are classical writing (sometimes called "ISO" writing),
and "Packet writing", also called UDF.
ISO writing is done with the main burning application of Roxio or Nero
or similar products. It's explicit, you create a layout manually, and
you burn it. There is no "drag and drop".
Packet writing is done implictly with a driver installed in the OS by
"writing" the file to a designated drive letter. It's done by modules
of the Roxio and Nero (or other) software OTHER THAN the main burning
application. It's also called "drag and drop", "Direct CD", "In CD" and
a few other names.
Packet writing -- ONLY -- requires a preformatted media. The
application (driver) has a utility to do this, sometimes by right
clicking on an icon in the system tray.
Now I'm going to make a controversial suggestion, which is, don't use
packet writing, at all, ever. When I'm installing burning software, I
don't even install it, in most cases. Packet writing produces a
non-standard ("non-ISO", literally) disc. If you create a CD by packet
writing, there is no guarantee that it will read on any given computer
other than the one on which it was made, or one that has the same
software installed on it. If it's got any kind of media on it (audio,
video, MP3, whatever) it will NOT play in ANY "non-computer" devices.
It's a "non-standard" disk. Ok, it allows you to avoid the complexity
of learning how to make a "real" CD, and it lets you write by "drag and
drop", but there's a huge price to be paid for that and, in particular,
if you are making a disc for archival stoarge, there's no guarantee that
when you need that backup disc, you will be able to read it.
[And, I know, lots of people don't agree with my advice not to use
packet writing. If you must, go ahead, but some day, when you most need
one of those discs .......]
By the way, the "drag and drop" CD writing in Windows does NOT use
packet writing. What it does is store a "copy" of the material to be
written until you are ready to "write" the CD, then it burns it all at
once using ISO writing. The actual code that is used is a very, very
highly scaled down version of the Roxio code from their main burner
application.
This is a far more complex subject than these few paragraphs would have
you believe, but this is as much detail as I can comfortably go into in
this forum.
