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| I've been using Roxio Drag2Disk for writing to CD-RW disks. I figured XP
| probably has built in capability for writing and formatting CD-RW but I
| couldn't find any way to access the capability
XP has built-it support for erasing and creating CDs. However XP creates
session at once (SAO) or disk at once (DAO) CDs. This means:
1-copying files to CD actually prepares the files for writing.
2-selecting "copy files to cd" on the context-menu for the recorder opens
the CD-writting dialog box.
To enable this functionality:
Start --> Control Panel --> Administrative Tools --> Services
find "IMAPI CD-Burning COM Service"
double click it and set startup type to automatic.
| so I uninstalled the Drag2Disk
You did this, because it is causing conflicts with the CD-burning software,
when you try to burn disk, don`t you?
| thinking maybe I would be able to find a native XP capability if
| the Drag2Disk was gone. But NO - I still can't find any capability in XP.
| Do I really need 3rd party software like the Drag2Disk ?
Well, I guess you are not looking for this way of creating CDs, are you?
I believe you want to use CD-RW as a hard disk. Bad thing is XP has no such
built-in functionality and you need a 3-rd party application. Vista has what
you are looking for.
| Also, can someone point me to a website where they explain the different
| situations for reading and writing CD-RW ?
Google for it ;-)
To use CD-RW as a flash disk or floppy, it must be formated with UDF.
Unfortunately XP and 2003 server have read-only support for UDF file system
and cannot write files to a formated CD-RW. Windows Vista has write support
for UDF, so it can format and write to UDF. By the way UDF = Universal Disk
Format, so guess what? You can format a partition on your hard disk in UDF
too (but I don`t know of any advantages of doing so, further more, when you
come back to XP, you will find that the disk is read only ;-).
Also there is a bug in XP an 2003 server: If you reformat a hard-disk
partition from UDF to NTFS, it will remain UDF. I tried to delete and
recreate the partition and it still remained UDF. The only way is to fix
this from Vista (reformat to NTFS).
What are the 3rd party applications doing?
In general:
1-Add write support for UDF file system.
2-Cause conflicts with the CD-burning software ;-)
