I haven’t used my CD-RW capacity much, but I recently bought a laptop and realized that the CD-RW is the easiest way to move masses of info from the desktop to the laptop.* I really, really, want to just treat the CD-RW as if it were a ginormous floppy disk, but Nanny Bill doesn’t seem to like that option so he conveniently encrypts every file, turning them read-only. When I try to uncheck the read-only box in “properties,” I get the dreaded message: “error occurred applying attributes.”
Which I find hateful, and makes me want to do to Nanny Bill what various aggrieved parties did to Edward II, only with a chainsaw. And of course there are no answers anywhere that make the remotest sense to me, talking about changing registries and whatnot. Help?
*This is not an invitation to suggest how to create a home network, or add wireless capacity, or other such things. Those are not mature technologies yet - “mature” defined as those requiring no more thought, understanding, or effort on my part than does my vacuum cleaner. Thank you.
Almost any file burned to a CDR or CDRW is going to have the read only file attribute set. It’s just the the way files are laid down on CD. Unless you are using some kind of packet software that mimics/fakes the CDRW looking like a floppy you can’t erase and re-write individual files. You can write files all the way to the end and then format and start over, but typically all the files written will be read only until you erase and start over.
Tarnation. I was afraid you were going to say that. Sigh. Yet another reason why the computer that will replace both the desk top and the lap top, in ca. 18 mo., will be whatever latest Apple fabulosity there is.
Well, that’s great and all, but MS vs. Apple has nothing to do with it. If you’re gonna packet write in Windows, Mac or Linux the end result will be just as Astro mentioned.
Yes, CD-ROMS are by definition read-only (that’d be the RO part, then). They were never meant to be treated the way floppy disks are, really. There are programs such as DirectCD to change this, but I’ve never gotten into the habit, personally.
You cannot change the Read Only attribute ON the CD-ROM itself. Because once the CD-ROM is written, files on it cannot be edited the way you would with a floppy disk.
What you can do is to copy the files from the CD-ROM back onto the hard disk and then change the attributes. Using the CD-ROM basically to transfer data from desktop to laptop, rather than as a floppy disk in itself. Once you copy the files onto the hard disk you can make whatever changes you like.
To make things easier, and to retain attributes of the files so that you don’t have the hassle of trying to figure out which were originally read only and which weren’t, you can zip all the data into one nice big zip file, then write the .zip file onto the CD-ROM and then copy it onto the other hard disk and unzip it. This way you retain all attributes and long file names, along with huge sub directory trees.
Well, there’s your problem. The point of CD-RW is just to behave like a regular CD, except that you can re-use the media rather than throwing it away and burning a new one like with CD-R. It is not intended to make the CD a randomly writable device like a magnetic drive.
No OS is going to change that…
Also, XP is not encrypting your files (which implies the contents are being scrambled so as to be unreadable) they are simply read-only due to the nature of CDs.