Vista wants to format CDs

[Ray]

When I try to open a CD (*not* a CD-R or -RW) in Explorer, it often
pops up a window asking how I want to format it. This is kind of silly
for a non-writeable disc. If I click Cancel, it won't open the disc.
Instead I have to let it try to format the disc and give up before it
will open.

A while back I called Dell support and was told to uninstall the CD
drive and reboot. This fixed the problem once, but when I tried it
again more recently it didn't help. I also tried turning on the Shell
Hardware Detection service. That seemed to fix it for a while, but the
problem has returned.

Anybody have any ideas how to fix this?

The system is running Home Premium and the drive is a PBDS CD/DVD
burner. Autoplay is disabled. The dialog box that pops up is titled
"Burn a Disc". It says "Prepare this blank disc", and has an edit box
labeled "Disc title".

 

[Ray]

Well a small fix that has worked for some of my discs is to make a
1kb text file and have it burnt onto the CD-R and it will read
everything just fine. However, I've run into regular CDs I have
and that solution doesn't work because of the write protect issue.
So I'm still stuck with that part myself.

I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one with this problem.

Converting from XP to Vista, this issue is just massive and have
not found any forum to have found a workable fix aside from using
your old PC to transfer stuff to an external drive or something of
the like. I can't afford this, and even if I could, my old PC no
longer works for me to do this with.

The only other solution I've come across is a recovery software
you can buy, but as I said, I am not exactly that wealthy to spare
that at present.

For me it's not a huge deal. I just let Vista try to format the disc.
After it realizes the disc can't be formatted, it gives up and lets me
browse the files normally. But it's a pain to keep having to do this.
Maybe I'll take another shot with Dell's tech support.

 

[Ray]

Pardon me if I appear to be contradictory. There is no such thing
as "write protection" in any cds. For cd -r or cd+r, you can write
until the disc is full, and you canNot re-write again. Only cd-rw
will allow you to erase and re-write.

That's true, but the message it gives is that the disc is write-
protected. In my case, the disc is usually a factory-made CD-ROM, not
a -R or -RW, so it was never writeable. Maybe the "write protected" is
just a bit of imprecision on Microsoft's part.

As to the "option" part,
the system just want to know if you want to burn "stuff", or read
what's in it. If your cd is already formatted, the system should
not ask to format. Something is wrong, either the cd is corrupted
or the cd/dvd drive needs checking.

It's not the disc, as it happens with all discs I've tried, and they
all work after I let it try (and fail) to format. For the same reason,
I doubt that it's the drive. But for me it's a moot point, as the
problem seems to have gone away for some reason. Maybe it has to do
with the phase of the moon or something.

 

[Ray]

Yup, my problems come from CD-Rs I wrote in XP. I'm thinking it's
just a big compatibility option between the two OS and I have yet
to figure out a solid workaround. But if there was no such thing
as Write-protection, then it wouldn't tell me about it when I try
to burn something on to a disc and it fails.

It sounds like your problem is different from mine. I found that all
CDs had the problem, whether I had burned them myself on a Win2k system
or they were commercially pressed ones. The only workaround I can
suggest is to let it try to format; it gives up quickly and allows you
to view the contents. At least, that worked for me.

My problem seems to have resolved itself sometime in the last couple of
weeks. The only major change I made was uninstalling ZoneAlarm, but I
suspect that was just a coincidence.

 

[Gordon]

I'll have to check on a CD-R that doesn't have important info on it. I
don't want to run the risk that it'll actually do that to me. lol I'll
let you know how that goes.

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[Ray]

OK, Vulcanander and Ray, I probably had totally misread your
posts. Are we talking about music cds afterall ?

Not in my case. I'm talking about data CDs that are commercially made
(i.e. pressed, rather than recorded to CD-R). Data CD-Rs that have
been closed may also have the problem, but I don't recall for sure.

In my last post I reported that the problem had gone away, but now it's
back -- probably because I posted that it was gone. But it's
unpredictable; sometimes there's a problem, other times it works fine.