CD-WRITING UTILITY FAILING TO TRANSFER FILES

[regmoat]

I have used the built-in Windows CD writing utility several
times to copy a few files to a CD-R, and had no problem.
However, I recently tried to copy a folder that had about
400 folders containing a total of about 3600 files, almost
all Word documents, and it failed.

I tried several times to make it work, but it copied over
*only about 25%* of the files to the default temporary area
on the hard drive that Windows uses to store the files
before writing to disc. Does anyone know why this might
have happened?

The total size of the top-level folder is about 178 MB, not
a small transfer, but not huge either. I used several
brand new High Speed discs to see if maybe a defective disc
was the issue. But then I realized that the Windows
temporary temporary file area was the issue -- the missing
files were not showing up there after I had copied the
top-level folder that contained them all. In fact, only
one of the three second-level folders showed up, and within
that folder their were also missing folders. In all, about
75% of the files were lost.

I'm running a new PC with a 3.0 GHz CPU and 1 GB of RAM,
Windows XP Pro.

Are there some limitations to this utility that I'm unaware
of? I've been using DirectCD until recently, and never had
a problem like this with that utility.

Thanks.

George

 

[Harry Ohrn]

You might find some help here "HOW TO: Troubleshoot Issues That Occur When
You Write Data to a CD-R or CD-RW Optical Disc in Windows XP"
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=324129

 

[Airman PD]

Zip the folder up, then burn the zipped file.

 

[George]

Thanks to both for your responses.

Harry, I checked out the MS web page that you recommended
and all of the relevant links on it. None would seem to
apply to me, with the exception of the link to the
"Hardware Device and Device Driver Compatibility" page. I
did not find my TDK 5200B internal burner, which is only a
few months old, in the list. In fact, I found no TDK
burners in the Windows Catalog. That seems strange to me.

You might think "Well, that's the problem", but the thing
is the files that are not showing up are not showing up in
the Windows Temporary Files area in Windows Explorer -- i.
e., BEFORE I even try to write to disc. Wouldn't that
suggest that the problem is all in WIndows and has nothing
to do with the CD burner at all?

Thanks for any help!

George

-----Original Message-----
You might find some help here "HOW TO: Troubleshoot Issues That Occur When
You Write Data to a CD-R or CD-RW Optical Disc in Windows XP"
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=324129

--

Harry Ohrn - MS MVP [Shell/User]
www.webtree.ca/windowsxp

I have used the built-in Windows CD writing utility several
times to copy a few files to a CD-R, and had no problem.
However, I recently tried to copy a folder that had about
400 folders containing a total of about 3600 files, almost
all Word documents, and it failed.

I tried several times to make it work, but it copied over
*only about 25%* of the files to the default temporary area
on the hard drive that Windows uses to store the files
before writing to disc. Does anyone know why this might
have happened?

The total size of the top-level folder is about 178 MB, not
a small transfer, but not huge either. I used several
brand new High Speed discs to see if maybe a defective disc
was the issue. But then I realized that the Windows
temporary temporary file area was the issue -- the missing
files were not showing up there after I had copied the
top-level folder that contained them all. In fact, only
one of the three second-level folders showed up, and within
that folder their were also missing folders. In all, about
75% of the files were lost.

I'm running a new PC with a 3.0 GHz CPU and 1 GB of RAM,
Windows XP Pro.

Are there some limitations to this utility that I'm unaware
of? I've been using DirectCD until recently, and never had
a problem like this with that utility.

Thanks.

George

.

 

[George]

Airman PD,

I tried your suggestion, and it worked -- up to a point.

First of all, I discovered by experimenting with copying
the top-level folder to my desktop that there were
*pathnames that were too long* (according to the error
messages I got) for Windows to handle. I do have about
seven levels of folders, so that did not totally surprise
me. So, I temporarily removed those folders and files with
the long pathnames, and then the Windows copying process to
the Windows CD Burning folder worked.

Then, I decided to try your Zip method using Windows'
built-in Zip utility. Well, everything -- *including* the
previously mentioned folders with the pathnames that were
too long -- copied over OK into the Windows zip file. But
I discovered that any saved web pages would not open the
images that were saved in their corresponding "web page
filename_files" folder. Only the text of the HTML was
showing. A problem, but not too bad. So, I extracted
them. Well, when I extracted the whole top-level folder
that had been zipped, I got a bunch of pop-up messages
promting me to enter a *password* for many of these files,
as well as a few Word files. There is no password on any
of these files or folders. So, I had to skip extracting
those files and therefore lost dozens of files.

Any idea as to why this happened?

Thanks again.

George