How exactly does a CD-RW work?

I just bought my first pack of CD-RW's last night, and I think i've managed to ruin 2 of them already >_<. As a test, I first tried burning random files to one, now it doesn't copy anything at al. Second, I copying a game with nero, then it said something about failure, but I don't remember what it was. How do I delete the files off of CD-RW? That was why i pretty much bought them in the first place.

You don't 'delete' files on your CD, you just write over them. Basically RW CD's have a lot of layers and you just keep burning the layers off everytime to write to them again. Just make sure you burn them as multisession discs.

but be warned, cdrw's arent so flexible as cdr's, so some cd-rom's cannot read cd-rw discs properly...

if your burning music you want to listen on most all cd players burn your music on cd-r's not rw's. Allso like maison said keep the disk "open" with multisession if you close the session off at the end of the write, all the files on that cd-rw will have to be burned over meaning all files on that disk will be lost.

I don't know about the rest of you guys but I heardly have ever use the rw function on my cd-rw drive. :biggrin:

I use it often...If have a file bigger then 1.44, then I'll put it on CD. :D (I hate to split it with WinRAR or WinZip)

Trying to copy a full game cd onto a cd rewritable isnt always possible cuz cdrws usually hold only 575 mb after formatting.

The only time you should write music to a CDRW is to play them on your Xbox. The Xbox does not read R's but it does read RW's.

You can also use InCD (by Ahead Software -- same company as Nero) to format your RW disc in such a way that you're able to use it as a floppy disk. As in, you can then just "Drop" files into it or "delete" them..

...and by my opinion, it's the only feature (that MasJ mentioned) that is close to flexibility of plain old floppy diskette.