Please, someone, WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON WITH MY CD RECORDER?

[fpb]

(Cross-posted to the Computerhelp community, which has however been rather deaad and unhelpful of late.)

For years I have recorded files from computer to CD-R, happily and without any trouble, by either dragging their icons on to the CD-R's window or ordering "move this file to" the CD rewriter. Now, when I try to do either, I get a message that says:Cannot copy X: files on this CD are read-only. You can still copy new files to this writable CD, which will replace files already on the disc. This does not make any sense to me: first, why should the supposed read-only status of files on the disc prevent me from recording new files on unrecorded sectors, and, second, why the Hell should I however be allowed to delete the files I already have in favour of new versions, but not to get in new ones? Am I missing something, has Windows gone mad, or is there something I don't know? It's driving me mad, because I have a lot of graphic files to transfer.

Comments

[inverarity.livejournal.com]

First, what program are you using to do your file transfers?

Second -- pardon me for telling you things you may already know, but it's not clear exactly what you are trying to do. There are two kinds of recordable CDs: CD-R (on which you can record files only once, and then the CD is fixed) and CD-RW (which can be rewritten). Assuming you're writing to the latter, they still don't act like thumb or external disk drives, on which you can add and delete files freely. Each time you want to write new files to it, they have to be "blanked," erasing previous data. It doesn't matter if there's still "room" on the CD-RW: every time you write to it, you write whatever files you are trying to put on it in that session and erase all previous files.

It's not clear how you could be deleting individual files on a CD-RW, as you say you are. To my knowledge, that's not possible*. What occurs to me is that you may be looking at the "image" that your software creates of what is to be burned to the CD. It may look like a file directory of your selected files, but it's not what's actually on the disk.

* This is not entirely true, but doing individual packet writing is more technical than you want to get into, and requires non-free software.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I am using Windows Explorer.

I know the difference between CD-R and CD-RW. I said CD-R and I meant CD-R. I wanted to make permanent records - at least as permanent as any CD ever is.

I did not say that I am deleting individual files from a CD. I said that the dialog from the program told me I could do that, and that that was the only thing I could do. I am perfectly aware that it makes no sense and I said so.

[mentalguy.livejournal.com]

I have a suspicion that the error message is incorrect or misleading in this particular context.

Is the CD-R in this case entirely fresh, or have files been recorded to it previously which you are trying to supplement/replace?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

In each case this happened, I had used the CD before. One of them, in particular, had had additions made to it several times, as I got hold of various issues of a particular series. I had had no problems before. The message makes no sense.

[mentalguy.livejournal.com]

All right, so we're dealing with a multisession CD then. Does this now happen with any CD so used, or only some of them?

Also, did you only start getting the error with the new computer/new windows version? (What version of Windows is this?)