My old computer, which I accidentally killed about a week and a half ago, came with Adaptec Easy CD Creator 4. Since I hadn’t planned on zapping the power source the day after getting my new computer, I didn’t think ahead and close all of the cdrs that I had recorded things on. Which, when placed in the new computer all register as “blank cdrs.” I have the old computer’s hard drive in the new computer, but it’s not one of the programs that still works anyway. Surprisingly a several of the others do.
Unfortunately, the Adaptec program was a factory installed one, so I can’t install it on my new computer (which I think sucks because when you put the application recovery disk in it complains that it only works on HP pavillions. That’s what the new computer is too!) so I’m probably going to have to buy the Easy CD Creator program in order to install it. But version four is hard to find even on E-Bay and Half.com. How likely would it be that a newer version (6?) would still be able to read the cdrs? I worry because Roxio began producing the program after version four. Is that likely to make a difference?
And has anyone here upgraded from 4 to 5 or 6? Knowing how it worked out for others would be ideal.
Well, astro says in a line what I was typing an obfuscated novel to say, but you should be able to “close” a CD using any CD burner.
I brought some more info in case someone cares; basically in a multisession CD, there’s a temporary table of contents written to a special area of the disk reserved for this purpose. CD burners should be able to read this area and display files normally, while regular drives check the real table of contents only.
When you “close” a CD, your burning program collects each separate entry made in the temporary area, then writes the whole thing out to the real TOC. As far as I know, the temporary TOC isn’t written in a manufacturer specific mannar, but using a newer version of the same brand of burning software shouldn’t pose a problem at all.
If your new computer can’t read the CDRs then 1 of 2 things is going on. (I am assuming that the CDs are readable in other devices.)
The new CD drive is foobarred. 'Nuff said.
The CDRs weren’t written in a standard format. E.g., CD Creator (among others) also come with a direct CD write program that allows you to drag and drop files to the CD. But each of these programs uses its own special format. You can only recover the files using the original program.
Closing CDs has nothing to do with the behavior you are seeing for any CD drive made in recent years.