Dealing with CD-RW Disks

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CD-RW disks are pretty much like CD-R disks except that they can be erased and then written to again. They are also quite a bit more expensive than CD-R disks.

Using CD-RW disks is much like working with CD-R disks. If the disk is blank, there is no difference in the process at all, which makes things quite simple. If, however, the CD-RW disk already has data on it that you wish to replace with something else, the process is only slightly different.

One of these differences is that Nautilus will treat your CD-RW disk as a regular data disk rather than a blank one. This means that when you pop your disk into the drive, a regular Nautilus window will automatically open, rather than a CD Creator window.

To write to the disk, you will need to switch from the Nautilus window to a CD Creator window manually, which is easily done by selecting CD Creator in the Go menu of the Nautilus window (or by replacing the /mnt/cdrom text in the Location box of that Nautilus window with burn:/// and pressing ENTER). Once you’ve done this, the window will become a CD Creator window. Now drag the files you want to burn to CD to that window, and, once you are ready to burn, click the Write to CD button.

Now comes the only other difference: In the Nautilus CD Creator dialog window (shown in Figure 7-5 on the previous page), click the Erase CD checkbox. Once you have done that, just click the Write files to CD button, and CD Creator will erase the files already on the CD-RW and replace them with the new ones that you dragged to the CD Creator window. Not bad at all, eh?

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