Computer Locks Up When Trying To Read CD-RW With Direct CD

sparrow:
I suppose I could just burn a fresh CD-R disk with song files I compiled on my hard drive. If that works, I'd have another good music CD, although it'd probably be quicker to take your suggestion of making a copy of the Roxio CD, which wouldn't be the worst thing in the world to have anyway, if it works. After all, a coaster is a coaster, if it doesn't. I'd burn the music files to a CD-R, track at once; I'd just copy the Roxio CD to a CD-R, disc at once, if it matters.

 

oshwyn5:
Just to clarify, you mean attempt to copy the offending CD-RW disk to a CD-R disk using Disk at Once, just like making an exact copy of a CD, to hopefully be able to save those song files?

A CD-R disk is where they would have wound up eventually anyway. All I'm doing is downloading, saving a bunch of song files, then playing them when I get time, to check out if I want to keep them, & burn them to a CD-R.

I only copy 1-3 times on a CD-RW, because I try to fill it at one shot, but sometimes it takes 1 or 2 more.

All the Cd-RW disks I have, once they're formatted for Direct CD, only show 535 MB out of 650MB available when they're blank & empty. Perhaps the rest is for this table of contents & other system files.

The 2 full CD-RW disks I tried yesterday, & was able to open & read, ONLY had 2MB left on them out of the 535MB, & they worked just fine, so maybe all that extra space is just what's needed to make them work, but I can fill every bit of the 535Mb that's left.

I don't drag & drop, to add or copy files, I use copy & paste, if that matters, & usually the songs are all pretty different, so I don';t make folders, but this is just temporary storage until I can burn the song files to CD-R disks.

I may have to figuire out how to do an image burn for the CD-RW to CD-R transfer, because the CD-RW disks don't seem to read in my CD-ROM, just my CD-RW, so I can't just put 1 in each & just copy, like I can with sparrow's suggestion of copying the Roxio CD. Do I have to copy disk at once to try this or can I use track at once? Does it matter?

Should I format as well as erase the offending CD-RW disk after the copy attempt, because it caused problems before, so it hopefully works the next time?

 

sparrow & oshwyn5:
I'll have to give this some thought & try some of your suggestions later when I get time, as I'm getting ready to go away again. I might have some time tonight or tomorrow or over the next week, I do want to solve this problem, & hopefully it's just a weird problem with this particular disk & not the drive.

 

sparrow: I took your advice & copied my Roxio CD to a CD-R disk, not that I necessarily wanted another Roxio CD, but like I said I guess it never hurts to have an extra in case something goes wrong with the original, & that was probably quicker than picking songs & burning them to a CD-R, & the Roxio CD's a known good source I suppose.

I tested it in the following ways:with my CD-RW & CD-ROM drives:
With Windows Explorer:
1)R-C, choose explore - OK- Read it & files showed up
2)R-C, choose open -OK - Read it & files showed up
3)L-C, highlight -OK-Read it & files showed up
With My Computer: 1),2),3), & 4)D-C, asked if I wanted to install, hit cancel
Also did the same when I loaded the CD in either drive

Apparently the drive's not bad, which is a good thing, neither is the disk, & neither are the files. It looks like oshwyn 5 was right about it being a TOC thing. That's the only thing makes any twisted weird sense.

I did similar experiments per oshwyn5's suggestion. Read my reply to his latest, to get the full story & resolution.

Thanks for your input. It helped to get me where I needed to be.

 

oshwyn5:
What do you mean by is there anything recoverable on the CDR? I was able to copy files or burn them from the CD-RW to the CD-R, & they read & in some cases, play, but if they're burned on, then how do I get them off?
I had the song files still on my hard drive, so they were already recovered, & I was not only able to conduct your experiment, but to get back to where I was before this trouble began.

It would seem you were right about the cause, even though I don't understand it, but your help & sparrow's got me to where I needed to be.

Thanks for your input. How do I prevent this problem from occurring in the future, or is it just some annoying fluke or glitch?

 

Thanks for the reply. You proved that the drive is not at fault and the problem has to be with the disk that you couldn't read. Might have been from a bad batch?

With your experience it's hard to believe the problem is user error.

 

sparrow:
Thanks for your vote of confidence on my experience. I'm no expert but I manage to get around ok. Just several short years ago, when I got this computer, 98-99, I knew absolutely squat, learned some since, & even managed to get my & several other people's computers back up & running. I guess that's ok since I'm not a compute tech guy, don't do it for a living.

Apparently the disk wasn't bad either, maybe just some fluke or glitch. If you read my latest reply to oshwyn5, I was able to erase the offnding disk, format it again for direct cd, & test the read capability all those ways i told you, & it read & showed fine, both befor & after I copied the same files back onto the same Cd-RW disk. So the files wer good, & the disk & the drive.
After I copied the files back onto the disk, it showed only 17 mb left where there were 56mb before, so i think oshwyn5 was onto something with his TOC
theory. I just still don't get why it left me copy files to it once maybe twice .

 

From your first post:

and you were wondering about Windows being the culprit. Think we excluded that source of trouble and narrowed it down. It's not unusual to fail to get a definite final answer; narrowing things down is almost as worthwhile. You know you're not in the market for a new drive or a Windows update!

 

sparrow:

That's Good News ! I'm Sure Glad It Went That Way !

 

I just finished reading through this entire post and thought I'd add this. It's possible it was just a temporary glitch with the cd itself. Though far more reliable than floppies, CD's aren't infallible and sometimes stuff just happens. On the other hand, it's also possible that oshwyn5's suggestion as to the TOC not getting updated correctly is the culprit. You haven't really said whether or not DirectCD is loaded or not so I thought I'd mention this. If you've used msconfig to disable it from the startup group, make sure you enable it again or you could be right back in the same boat. Look in your system tray. Is the icon for DirectCD there? If so, you should be ok. If not, you should find out why.

Disabling DirectCD in the startup group doesn't cause packet writing to be disabled. The driver for it is loaded when windows starts and it'll work just fine even with DirectCD disabled. That program that loads at startup is a program that monitors the process and as oshwyn5 said, sees to it that the cd gets closed properly before you can eject it. It doesn't seem to always cause data loss if it's unloaded but most certainly it can. So, as I said, be sure you have DirectCD loading at startup.

 

Zander: Thanks for your reply to my post. If I didn't mention it before, or make it clear, I'll do that now. No, I don't have Direct CD loading at start up. No, I don't have Direct CD showing in the system tray, & yes, I know why. I disabled it in msconfig, because I thought the idea was only to have what's necessary loading at start up, & minimize the amount of icons showing in the system tray, so as to not slow down the computer, make it have more system resources at start up, & hopefully run more efficiently.

I do, however, open or load Direct CD prior to copying files from my hard drive, through windows explorer, onto a CD-RW disk that I formatted for Direct CD. I've already tried it without doing that, but even though I could copy files, I had problems where the CD-RW disk wouldn't eject, so I started opening or loading Direct CD 1st, then I didn't have that problem anymore.
Wouldn't that be just as good or is it still better to have it loading at start up so I don't forget to load or open it prior to copying file to a CD-RW disk?
Does it do something different loading at start up rather than just loading prior to use, that makes it better to do it that way, other than what I said?
I have done it this way for a long time now, & have not had this problem.

When you say "cd gets closed properly before you can eject it ", what exactly do you mean? I don't understand all the technical terminology, such as packet writng, data los, nalized, etc. It seems like you're referring to the copying files process, which is where I discovered the problem, but it seems like oshwyn5 was referring to a problem during the formatting for Direct CD process. The only kind of disks that I ever "close" or "finalize" are CD-R, 1 time recordable, disks with music files, starting out as MP3s, winding up as I believe WAV files "burned" onto them permanently, that once done, can't be added to or have files removed from. With CD-RW disks, on the other hand, I thought the idea was to be able to add to them until they're full, & can be deleted from, erased, reformatted, reused, etc. So I don't understand what either you or oshwyn5 means by "close" or "finalize" a CD-RW disk. Also, I don't remove a CD-RW disk during the format for Direct CD process, until it's done & a box appears saying the disk is now ready for read & write through windows explorer or a program such as microsoft word, so I still don't get how this happened unless it was just that, a fluke or glitch, that hopefully won't ever happen again.

If it's actually better, for whatever reason, to have Direct CD loading at start up, it's no big deal for me to go back into msconfig & re-enable it. I suppose it won't kill me to have 1 more icon in my system try, wher I now have just 5:task scheduler, sound mixer, pop up stopper, avg anti vrus, zone alarm firewall. Now you're not talking about enabling Create CD or anything else from that prgram, right, just Direct CD, & I can just open any other when I'm ready to use them?

I won't do anything until I receive your reply.

Thanks again for your reply to my post.

 

It should be ok to leave DirectCD out of the startup group as long as you load it before writing to cd. I've done it many times myself. It does the same thing as it would if loaded at startup. I know that not having it loaded causes it to not eject a cd when DCD isn't loaded but a couple of times I've seen where people would uncheck DCD in msconfig and then not put 2 and 2 together when the tray wouldn't open. They used a paperclip to open the tray manually and then messed up the cd (on both occassions). In your case, it's hard to say what caused the problem if it was loaded. Something went wrong somewhere. One possibility I can think of right off hand is if you have a power outage or if windows should crash while you have DCD formatted cd in the drive. If this happens there's a good chance of losing the data. For this reason it's always a wise thing to remove the cd as soon as you're done writing to it.

As to closing the cd, it doesn't really get closed in the same way a cd does when you write a cd in the normal fashion. I only use the term closing for lack of a better term. Whenever you write to a disk using DCD, it always has to update the table of contents as oshwyn5 stated earlier. If that doesn't get done before you eject the cd, the cd will most likely be toast. So, in a sense, the cd needs to be closed (for lack of a better term) before it is ejected. Watch when you eject a cdrw that's formatted for DCD. A small window pops up saying something about preparing to eject the cd or some such thing. I don't really remember exactly what is says as I haven't used it for some time now but when you see that message, that's when it's "closing" the cd or at least that's my understanding of it.

Packet writing is just a term for writing to a cd in this manner. When you used DCD or Nero's InCD to write to a disk it's called packet writing. Data loss is just what you experienced. You lost the data on the cd.

 

Thanks, Zander. That's an excellent point. Mine is always running so it didn't occur to me that not everyone's is!.

 

Zander: I have my notifications set to always show that box prior to ejecting the CD-RW disk, as well as the box when you load a CD-RW disk, that says ready to read & write through windows explorer, whenever I use a CD-RW disk formatted for Direct CD. Unless it's really necessary, I'd rather not have Direct CD load at start up, because other than the other reasons I already mentioned, it's not like I use it every day, so most of the time it'd be loaded for nothing. I just have to remember to keep loading it before I write to or copy files on a CD-RW disk. Like I said before, I do that anyway, since I found that eject problem, but never really knew I had to before that, since I figured ready to read & write through windows explorer meant just that, & not in conjunction with using Direct CD at the same time. I thought before anyway, that Direct CD was just a utility to format CD-RW disks to be able to read & write through windows explorer, not necessarily needed after format.

Thanks for your input.