Re: Saving to D--Packet Writing

[Patricia M Godfrey pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

In my experience, and I use XCOPY to archive four networked PCs to UDF
CD-Rs every week, the chief causes of flakiness are having other apps
running in the background and bad media. But there is a very interesting
wrinkle to the Directory name problem Martin reported. I discovered that
if you copy files and directories from a hard drive to a UDF CD, whether
you do it by drag-and-drop from MyComputer or by XCOPY from the command
prompt (or a batch file or VBScript, or combination thereof), the
original files display the usual short-form (8.3, with ~N as the 7th and
8th chars, N being a number) names when viewed from the DOS prompt, but
the same files on the UDF CD will have short-form names like ZIP#31C
(original was ZIPARCHIVE in Windows, ZIPARC~1 in DOS). This is under InCD
vers 3.33.0, dated 7/10/02, part of Nero Express Version 5.5.10.54.
That's on my home PC, where I did the experiment. At the office we're
running Adaptec CD Creator (old, with the Adaptec name) and Roxio (also
fairly old); both came bundled with the burners, and both showed the same
pattern of XYA#12A for filenames under DOS.

Another interesting wrinkle is that Adaptec/Roxio will NOT (at least in
the versions we have) UDF format a CD-RW, but only CD-Rs, whereas Nero
will NOT UDF format a CD-R, only CD-RWs. (But Roxio and Adaptec were able
to read UDF CD-RWs created by Nero.) The Nero approach seems more
logical, IMHO. And the small CD formats (mini or business card) really
are unreliable. Pity.

Other caveats: Turn off anti-virus software when UDF formatting or
burning a CD. In fact, turn off everything but Systray, Explorer, and the
burning app when burning a CD. On the other hand, when I run my archive
routine (a combination of VBSCripts and batch files that call each other
in a daisy chain), there is a lot of stuff in the tray and I have few
problems. But reading disks from one machine to another can be very
problematic. We've had CDs that others gave us lock up the machine
tighter than a drum. And right-clicking and asking for Properties on a
CD-R or CD-RW will often trigger "Explorer has caused ..." Oh drat. I
could have sworn I wrote that down. It's something about a fault in
Kernel32.dll.

My newest burner, an Acer, came with a list of recommended media brands
(several of which I have never seen anywhere!), and I use nothing else. I
was once having a terrible time formatting some Verbatim CD-RWs (on the
list of recommended brands), so I finally sent the last one back to
Verbatim, and the replacement they sent formatted without a whimper. So
evidently part of the problem is definitely quality control issues at the
media makers'.

Martin: did you try using the U2 LFN routine to read the discs?

Patricia