mystery cd format question

Hi, this is an XP pro question. I fielded a tech question this a.m. Person on phone had a laptop. 2 grey areas right off the bat: I presumed it was XP, and I didn't ask if it was XP home or pro. The laptop had a CD or DVD burner installed.

When she tried to write data to a CD-R, message happened that the data could not be written. So I had her open explorer window, right-click on the drive, and hit the format key. This worked, & data backed up successfully. For good measure, then had her go to drive properties and recording tab, and she put the check in the box which enabled recording on the drive. Everyone happy but me.

Because, imagine my surprise for my own CD burner, I don't have the "format" choice while in normal XP mode, in the explorer window-neither in right mouse nor in menu (although the person's laptop had this function). Further surprise that formatting a cd-r is available in command line. I presume it works (don't need to burn a cd-r right now). So I went looking for how to get that command into my explorer menu. This is what I found in MS expert zone (link below with quote). So the question is, duh, "format" just isn't available for CD-R in non-cli (windows), using no 3rd-party software, hmm? Thanks.

(from the expert zone):

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/expertzone/chats/transcripts/cdburning.mspx

Special Guest Patrick (Microsoft): Q: (Darn fat finger...) I have one machine from HP with DLA software on it that allows me to talk to the CD-R and CD-RW with a drive letter just like a floppy or hard drive. When can we expect to see something like this native to XP.

Special Guest Patrick (Microsoft): A: We don't have any specific plans to add support like this natively to Windows XP.