cd-rw burning among mutliple computers

[Ben_F]

my friend is having problems buring cd-rw discs on different computers...i've had the same problems before on my own setup. burning and deleting files on one disc between two different computers seems to do something screwy with disc so it ends up useless. is there a solution to this problem? its between two HP computers that are pretty much identical. i suggested buying an external firewire drive, but that would be an expensive solution. is there anyway to get a toggle switch or port so you could connect the same firewire drive to both computers? anybody have any other suggestions? thanks, Ben

[NDC]

It shouldn't matter that you're burning data from multiple computers and sharing between them. I burn data on various CDRW medias and share them among systems with different CDRW drives. For example, I would burn data on my Plextor CDRW drive at home and take it to work and save the it to hard disk and then delete the files and add files I need to to take home on a Sony CDRW drive. Have you tried using a packet burning program where it leaves the sessions open such as Adaptec Direct CD where you can delete and save to the CDRW media like a hard disk drive through Windows Explorer or any other Windows based shell programs? Also, if you're not burning data in increments using packet programs, but full, have you tried burning the CDRW media using Mode-1 CDROM, not Mode-2 CDROM XA?

[RayH]

Especially with the price of CD-RW devices coming down so low, it may be possible that the laser is slightly out of alignment on one of the machines. Making reading or writing by a different drive difficult. This is not unusual with 3-1/2" floppy drives and neither was it with the old 5-1/4" floppies.

Quite often misaligned drives will read and write discs just fine. But may only be capable of reading and writing discs made in that drive and maybe "factory" OEM discs. Sometimes they'll even read some other written discs.