Did I permanently burn my CD-RW? Can't erase it!

[Puritan]

I used Nero to burn an image of a floppy diskette onto a CD-RW (I needed it to boot up my laptop when it got screwy, since the laptop has no disk drive), but now I can't erase it in either Nero or using XP's built-in CD-RW support. If you burn an image of a floppy disk onto a CD-RW, is that a permanent burn that can't be erased? If it's not, how can I erase it again? Also, for future reference, is any sort of burn like that -- floppy image, music CD, video CD, i.e. anything besides just a file repository -- a permanent burn, so I shouldn't do that in the future? Thanks in advance.

 

[PODNickerz]

Have you tried in Nero to go to the Erase Rewritable option?

 

[Alex Ethridge]

I have never experienced the problem you describe so I cannot give you any help there; however, I would like to give you a few words of caution about using rewritable disks--just based on my own experience, of course.

When the rewritable disks were first introduced, the touted they were rewritable up to 1000 or 10,000 times. I've forgotten the exact number; but, it was in the thousands. Well, I began to experience read errors after as few as five rewrites in some cases and I don't think I ever got much over about thirty rewrites with any disk before disk read problems began to surface. The biggest problem here was that there was never a warning; I would find out when it was too late--when I needed to recover the written data from backup.

You see, there is no way for a CD burner to identify and mark a portion of the disk that goes bad like there is with hard disks and floppies. So the burner just continues to write right through the bad section and you don't find out you can't read that data until you try to read it back.

So, be careful about rewritables. Personally, I eventually discarded about 60 or so rewritables, many of which were still in their celophane wrappers and had never been opened. And, I no longer even install the packet writing software on any of my systems because I just have no use for unpredictable storage media.

 

[Puritan]

Originally posted by PODNickerz:
Have you tried in Nero to go to the Erase Rewritable option?

Yeah, it says that it can't be erased... hmm...

Maybe it is just a problem with my actual CD then, if no one has ever heard of a problem like this... oh well...

 

[mobo]

You say you couldn't erase the cd/rw, Have you tried earsing at different speeds ?

 

[MustBNuts]

Are you sure you are using an RW and not just a write-once.

I ask because it sounds to me like you've burned the CD then Nero "closed" it. Once closed, you cannot add or erase items on the CD.

FYI, when you close the Wizard and the New Compilation box opens, look at the last tab - you can check and uncheck "Finalize".

 

[AKA Arizona]

I have to agree with Alex. I have had similar issue with rewritable disk, we just Chunked the lot and bought the writeable ones. Besides today there really cheep and the data is to valuable to rely one defective disk.

 

[compilerxp]

- NERO has erase Re-Writable media option under tools. It will erase the CD-RW, no matter what - unless the disc itself is defective.

- Same here, I've experinced CD-RW failures after about 20 erasures... I use them to transport data to<>from clients or print shops, friends etc. But when possible, I usually use my new USB memory card - Very fast! But its a 128mb version.

- NOTE, there is an article I just read in which a LAB had testest about 30 no name brand CD-Rs (not the big brands TDK, 3m, Sony etc) and found that many of those disc start to DIE after a few months to a few years! I stick with TDK myself, pay the extra 40cents a disc (which is now 50cents with jewel case).

I hope that DVD-Rs have at least a REAL life span of 25~50 years, but I wouldn't be so sure...