Q: Burning CD-R disks...

[Jinx]

I burned some files to CD-R disks. When ejecting the disks, I did NOT finalize. This is my first experience, and I did not know the importance of finalizing. Anyhow, I swear I re-booted and wrote more to these disks, and eveything was fine.

Now, having reformatted the hard drive and loaded Windows 2000, the disks act as if unreadable. I was told the problem is most likely the index never got written to the disk, so the disks are unmountable. However, some say it is possible to trick the drive into mounting the disk.

Does anyone have any experience here? Maybe someone who has made the same mistake or is familiar with something called "PowerCD" software?

Please help!
- Jinx

[ftg]

Finalizing CDs is only really necessary to make CDs (esp. audio CDs) that are backwards compatible with older equipment.
Any CD-Rom drive of at all recent vintage should be able to read un-finalized CDs.

You may have confused this with "having an open session". I.e., the burn did not complete successfully for one reason or another. Your CD writing software should be able to: a. examine the disc and tell you what's on it (all tracks, if any are open, etc.) and b. close an open session (but possibly losing some of the data on the disc). Under CD-Creator, for example, it's on the menu under "CD Tools".

If your software cannot tell you what's on the disc, get better software.

Note that if you are burning multiple tracks (of data) on a CD, you need to import the old data into the new session to keep if visible.

See also the CD-R FAQ.