How exactly does a CD-RW work?

[Hipoccolos]

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.

[Mason]

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.

[gannondorf]

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

[grantu2]

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.

[Nitramuse]

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

[chaychigga]

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

[Magus]

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.

[MasJ]

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..

[gannondorf]

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