Sun, 15 Jan 2006 21:58:49 -0000 from Jeremy Lawrence
I have created a CD on my office PC. It holds about 14 MB. When I take it
home and put in my laptop, the CD is apparently full (it isn't) and I cannot
read the files on the CD.
If by "full" you mean that the free space shown in "Properties" is 0,
that's normal. You can nonetheless add files to the disk with Windows
XP or third-party software. Third-party software will tell you how
much space is actually available; I can't remember whether XP tells
you that because I gave up on XP's native burner after running into
many problems.
As for "can't read the files",
1. Try a known good disk in your laptop CD drive. Can you read it? If
no, the drive is probably bad.
2. Pop the disk you burned back into your office PC. Can you read it?
If no, the burner is bad or you screwed up somehow.
3. If (1) and (2) are both yes, your laptop probably has an older
drive that can only read "finalized" disks. If so, you'll need third-
party software on the machine that writes CDs, and tell it to close
the disk. (There will be a setting to close session and one to close
disk. Pick "close disk", not "close session".)
I suspect (3) is _not_ the problem, because most CD drives have been
able to read unfinalized disks for some years now. It would be
surprising to find your laptop drive can't do that, unless it's going
bad and just can't read disks.
P.S. When you close a disk as part of the burning, it really can't be
written to any more. A closed CD-R is as stable as anything can be.
You can't add files to a closed CD-RW, but you can erase it and start
fresh.
See the CD-R FAQ at <
http://www.cdrfaq.org/>.
