[speedo420]

hello,

i have a Dell Dimension 8300 with WinXp and the following drivesd a samsung Dvd-rom sd-616e and a philips Dvd+-RW Dvd 8801, the problem i'm having is reading some old cd's on this computer. i believe the file system is CDUDF, if that helps. i can take these discs to work and i can read them on any of our HP computers but not on my Dell.

i just got off DellConnect with a tech, after trying many things i have read in various other threads in this forum.................all he could tell me is that he thinks there is a problem with the cd's we tried to read. which to me doesn't make any sense.

I believe these discs were burnt using an older version of Sonic on an Gateway computer which we no longer have. does anyone have any suggestion on how how to enable UDF-reading on this Dell system of mine short of me taking them to work and reburning them.

thanks,

Steve

[Brendon]

Take them to work and reburn them!!

The old discs would have been burned using an older version of Sonic Drive Letter Access [DLA]. This is a packet-writing system, and such systems write non-standard discs which have a lot of problems with disc reliability and interchangeability [as you've found out].

If you take them to work and reburn them as standard CD-ROMs you'll avoid all those problems.

[speedo420]

thank you Brendon......now I'm wondering what is the difference with my version of WinXP
and the version we are using at work.

[Brendon]

Hi Steve,

Windows XP usually has a UDF Reader, but there are a lot of different versions of reader around.

Like the OEM versions of Sonic products which have different things activated/deactivated according to the whims and wallet of the OEM supplier, the OEM versions of Windows have different things installed [or not]. I'm guessing that's what you've run into.

It's the non-standard proprietory nature of the various brands of packet-writing software out there which makes so many of them incompatible, and that's why I think that it's worth giving up the small convenience of having Drive Letter Access, to use standard authoring software which makes standard CD-ROM or DVD-ROM discs which can be read in any PC.

Regards,
Brendon