Question Re: saving to CD-R

[jeane]

Issue regarding recording new files on a previously used CD-R. OS is
Windows XP Home edition. CD is used to transfer games to a computer that is
not connected to the internet. Previous games saved and transferred easily,
now can't save new games to that CD-R. When trying to save the files, we
get "Windows does not support this CD-R format. Please try another disc."
(Tried that!) Computer or CD-R disk capacity shouldn't be the issue, and
anyway, shouldn't the old files be overwritten on the disc? Hope this is
enough information. I'm probably not seeing something that should be
obvious, and would appreciate any help. Thanks in advance.

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

You cannot overwrite files on a CD-R disc. Did you mean a CD-RW disc?

 

[DJ Borell]

By default, if you use the Windows CD-Writing Wizard, it will use
multi-session writing. This allows you to "overwrite" files on a CD-R
by not closing the session on a CD. You aren't really overwriting the
files, you are simply adding the new version to the CD and making the
old version unavailable. To the end user, it looks as though you are
overwriting the old file.

However, there is a limit to how many times you can do this. Each
time you write the new version to the CD, you lose the old space used
to store the file and use up new space for the new version (IE, if the
file is 10 MB in size, the second session will cause 20 MB to be used
of the 700 MB available on a CD-R -- that is, 10 MB from the first
session plus 10 MB from the second.)

One other item needs to be updated -- the file table. Given the way a
CD's file table must be written, this may limit how many sessions can
be recorded, even if simple math says you should have more space
available. Someone else my be better able to speak to that.