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Questions tagged [compact-disc]

Compact Disc or CD is a type of optical physical media that can hold digital data (data, music, video). Standard CDs can hold up to 700MB of data, or 80 minutes of audio if converted to an audio-CD.

513 questions
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Why do CDs and DVDs fill up from the centre outwards?

I recently had to burn a DVD for the first time in ages and I was wondering why CDs and DVDs start in the centre and go towards the edge. Older rotating-disc media like vinyl records started from the edge and went towards the centre so it couldn't…
Burgi
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Can I write (200 MB - 150 min) music to a (700 MB - 80 min) CD?

I have mp3 songs of audio quality 320 kbps. The total size of the songs is around 200 MBs with a total playing time of around 150 minutes. Can I write these songs to an audio CD, whose specs are following: 52x top recording speed on a CD-R/RW…
skm
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How to destroy a CD/DVD rom safely?

I have old CDs/DVDs which have some backups, these backups have some work and personal files. I always had problems when I needed to physically destroy them to make sure no one will reuse them. Breaking them is dangerous, pieces could fly fast and…
user165733
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Why can't we write over a CD/DVD after it's been burned/finalized?

I was wondering why CD/DVD burners can't just overwrite a CD or DVD after it's been finalized and set to read-only mode. I understand that read-only mode prevents further writes, but can't a burner just ignore that and burn over the original data…
Luke
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Do most music CDs contain the needed info about their tracks?

I see that many audio players (I mean multimedia software like Winamp or Foobar2000) have the ability of searching music information on databases like CDDB. Shouldn't such info already be available on the music CD itself? And is it there? Some…
user162573
49
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7 answers

Open source / freeware application for Windows 7 to create ISO images

I'm looking for a freely available utility I can run on Windows 7 to create CD/DVD ISO images from actual CDs and DVDs. Any suggestions?
Nick Kavadias
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What is the purpose of this 4 pin cable with 3 wires that came with an old IDE DVD-ROM drive?

Stumbled on this cable today, it has 4 pins, of which only three are actually in use. It was found with a quick installation guide of an old DVD-ROM IDE drive and nothing else except some screws, so I'm not even sure it actually belongs to this. My…
mxt3
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Will there ever be faster CD and DVD discs and writers?

I was thinking about the fact that in the last years I have never seen CDs and DVDs supporting writing/reading speeds higher than 52X and 16X, respectively. Is this a commercial choice (i.e. manufacturers don't care about optical discs anymore and…
user1301428
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What prevents a CD-R from being rewritten?

I know it's kind of a dead / dying technology, but I was wondering what stops a CD-R from being rewritten like a CD-RW. Is it some sort of firmware on the disc, essentially in place to make people buy more CDs? Or is there a more technical reason,…
sam
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Why is desktop.ini "Ready to Be Written to the Disc" of any CD or DVD inserted under Windows 7?

I have a netbook with an external CD/DVD burner running Windows 7 Starter. Whenever I put any CD or DVD (doesn't have to be blank) in the drive and navigate to its path in Windows Explorer, it tells me under "Files Currently on the Disc": Files…
hippietrail
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Is it safe to use a regular marker (Sharpie, etc.) to write on a CD-R disc?

In the past I've used a special CD-R marker to write on CD-R's. But I'm wondering if it's OK to just use a regular felt-tip marker (Sharpie, etc.). (Obviously, a pen that you have to use pressure with (ballpoint, etc.) would NOT be safe.)
Clay Nichols
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How can I copy a DVD to another DVD using a single DVD drive?

I need to copy a DVD to another DVD, but I have only a single DVD drive. How can I accomplish this? I tried copying files to the desktop and then to another DVD. It didn't work out.
user23413
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Can I burn a CD ISO to DVD?

So can I burn an CD ISO to DVD? We've just got a bunch of DVD-R's lying around and I don't want to bother with torrents to download the new Fedora DVD.
Peter Turner
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How to copy files with an option for skipping stuck files?

I have a corrupted CD from which I want to copy files. The problem is that the default Windows 7 copy utility gets completely stuck when it encounters a corrupted sector of the CD. Can you recommend utilities with an option to manually skip certain…
Ori Popowski
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When installing Windows 7, CDBOOT error 5 appears: Cannot boot from CD; why?

I am installing Windows 7 on an old machine. I can not even get it to boot. I get this error message: CDBOOT: Cannot boot from CD - Code: 5 Boot Failure from Previous Device.. Boot Failure from Previous Device.. Broadcom UNDI, PXE-2.1 (build 082)…
Željko Filipin
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