Once again I have wandered into the wood, blithely accepting the stories about how easy and fun it was all to be only to find the reality somewhat different. A few months ago I purchased an Iomega CD burner. The acquisition was largely based on a very positive experience with Iomega’s 100 MB Zip drive. The machine comes with Adaptec DirectCD, Adaptec Easy CD Creator, Music Match Jukebox Plus, Adobe ActiveShare, Adaptec Toast & an HTML help manual. (There is precious little as far as printed manuals for hardware or software.) Another factor weighing in favor of buying the machine was the Adaptec software which was user friendly, or at least this was what I had heard and read. Of course, as you computer literate, super-users know, it is now actually Roxio in the stead of Adaptec. Lastly, as far as factors affecting purchase as the printed registration cards ask, was the price which was competitive with other similar units. I know those who know of my reluctance to part with any denomination of lucre will be incredulous but this really was the least heavily considered aspect in this case.

At the outset I will confess that I made the quintessential rookie mistakes with regard to choice of CD media for specific jobs. I think that they (Adaptec/Roxio) should do a little more comprehensive job explaining that the DirectCD software installs software which allows a CD-Rom drive to read the files on a CD created with the burner. This software is a UDF reader. UDF stands for Universal Disk Format, which is a file system for use with packet writing. Once you can read the files and open them with their native applications you can save them under different names to your hard drive after making any needed edits. Or just right-click the file in Windows Explorer and you have your normal Windows options: Open, Print, Send To, Cut,…….. and down at the bottom, Properties. The reason I mention this menu choice in particular is that you might have to click Properties and uncheck Read Only so that you can do the needed edits.

One of the first CDs I burned was some data I thought I would, in reality, not have to get to again. Why record it at all you may ask. Well, I was just playing with the new toy, and making some more room on my hard drive. Reason 2- see Reason 1. (He thought he would never need the stuff again.) In any event, a client calls and wants me to do some work on one of the jobs on the CD in question. OK, no problem thinks I and off I go to the CD rack. I tried to access the file in the regular CD-Rom drive. Nothing doing. I put the CD in the burner, now the folders and files can be seen but can’t be moved, copied, imported, etc., etc.

So I get on the horn to Tech Support after wasting a suitable amount of time with the generic HTML help. The essence of their input was as follows:

Oh yes, I let ‘em talk me into uninstalling and reinstalling the software. I know, I know, I should have just gone and gotten a beer and come back and called them and said I had done the deed. In any case, after reinstalling the software, the data on the CD in question was still not accessible.

In summation, when the Adaptec Direct CD Wizard asks if you want to format the CD, the only correct answer in a practical sense is yes. This format process will take from 25 to 45 minutes per the progress bar/dialog box (and in actual practice can take much longer). Iomega HTML style Help says a formatted CD-RW can hold about 530 MB and a formatted CD-R will handle 620 MB. One footnote on formatting: once the format is started it can not be cancelled. Waiting up to 90 minutes for a CD-RW to format is a difficult dose of medicine to take in terms of time but would seem to be the only way to ensure full functionality. Also, in lieu of a resolution per se, I am going to stick to "supported media" at least for the short term future. The only other suggestion I have to offer is test CDs that you have made to make sure that you can open files with the application which created them, make edits to those files and save them to other folders or drives. In other words, make sure you have a working backup before deleting any files on your hard disk. The fact that the CD burner can see the folders/files (and follow a path as I could do with this problem CD) is not enough. u