How to Format a Rewritable CD?

Rewritable CDs are a wonderful advancement over the standard writable CD-ROM. Before rewritable CDs came along, once you wrote something to a disk, it was there forever. If you forgot something, you had no way to amend it. There was no way to adjust or fix it after the fact. If it was a bad enough mistake, you just burned another CD. Today with the rewritable CD, you can add and take away stuff at any time, just like with a hard drive, flash drive or the old floppy disks.

Things You'll Need

• Computer
• CDRW Drive
• Windows Operating System (XP or Vista)
• Blank CDRW Media (disks)

Instructions

1. 

   Insert the blank CDRW media into the CDRW drive on your computer. Within a few seconds a window called "Autoplay Options" will pop up with options for what to do with the CD.

2. Select the option to "Burn Files to Disk" using Windows. There are other options there if you are wanting to create an audio CD or DVD, or even copy disks. However, in order to just format the disk as rewritable so you can add and remove files at will, you only want the "Burn Files to Disk" option. Once you click on this, another window will pop up called "Burn a Disk."

3. 

   Click on the "Show Formatting Options" at the bottom of the "Burn a Disk" window. This will display advanced options for formatting the disk. You want to select the first option, called "Live File System" in order to create your rewritable disk. This disk will be compatible with Windows XP as well as Windows Vista. The other option here will only allow you to create a disk once with no additional changes after that. You want to avoid that option.

4. 

   Click on the next button to begin the formatting process. Once you've clicked on the button, Windows will bring up a notification screen telling you that the formatting is in progress and showing a progress bar. Once the disk is formatted a Windows Explorer navigation screen will appear allowing you access to your newly formatted CDRW disk.

5. 

   Drag and drop files that you wish to have on the CD into the blank area representing the newly formatted CDRW disk. This disk will now appear as any other disk drive when inserted into a computer with a CDRW disk drive that supports the Live File system. Now you will be able to add and remove files from this disk just as you would any other disk or flash drive.

Tips & Warnings

• Just remember that you get what you pay for. Cheap no-name knock-off disks have a greater failure rate than name brands you normally would trust, such as Sony or Memorex.

• Never remove a disk while it is in the process of being formatted.