Are you using the built in formating in Windows XP? or a third party
application?
You are confused and know not what you speak of.
There is NO built in formatting capability for CDR(W)s in XP. None.
Nada. Zip. The big zero.
XP masters discs; this does not require formatting.
Formatting is involved when one wants to be able to read/write/erase
individual files on a CDRW (and to a limited extent, a CDR). For
that, you MUST turn to a third party application like InCD or Roxio
(Drag to CD? Is that what it's called now?). XP can't do that
natively.
Personally I steer clear of this UDF (packet writing) format as it is
not real realiable. It works fine until it doesn't, at which point
you are completely buggered and you have a CDR(W) that is completely
useless to you.