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Question: I am having problems with a CD-RW disc on my Dell Inspiron 5150 laptop. Over a period of about 3 months, I wrote a large number of files (.jpg and Microsoft Word) onto a CD-RW. There were probably 10 folders with umpteen files of about 82 MB – or less than 12 percent of the available space.

A couple of days ago, while writing another .jpg file to the disc, the program suddenly said that the disk could not be written on, and was probably “unusable.” This has happened before, but on those occasions I immediately rewrote that particular file and burned it to CD without further ado. This time… nothing.

When I tried to run the CD after the mishap, only 1 folder of about 20 files was seen, and it was not the new folder that I had been trying to write in. It was just one of the previous folders.

From the “Properties” tab, I could see the disc had only 419 KB of total space, and that this last folder itself occupied 419 KB. Mighty strange! On my trying to run it again and again, the disc at first indicated that it now contained no folder at all, and finally seemed to just get hung up. Help!

NOCCC: There is a simple solution to your basic problem but no simple answer to your question of why the problem occurred. The solution is to accumulate your files (up to about 600 megabytes) in a folder on your computer’s internal hard disk and/or an external hard drive. Then write them all at once in a single session to the CD. This will give you the back up of your files you want and avoid the problem you encountered. Read the rest of this entry »