CD-RW file attributes...

[Roadfish]

Have a buddy who is saving spreadsheet, and other Works files for that matter, to a CD-RW. When it does, it marks the file as read only and the attribute cannot be changed. To make changes to the files, he must copy them back to floppy or HD and then resave to CD-RW. OS is XP. The default logon account is called "owner" but it looks like it has administrator priveliges from what I can tell. It's a newer HP.

Ideas?

[reboot]

How is he saving to CDRW? What program?

[Roadfish]

The file he had me look at was an Excel spreadsheet. He's just saving the file to CDRW just as if to floppy.

[Tuf]

Sounds like he is using some packet writimg software like InCD or DirectCD possibly even XP's own version.

To save a file with the same name on a CDRW with the same name you'll have to delete the old one. There may be a way around it but if there is I don't know what it is. I haven't ever tried to change the way it works I suppose it's possiblr but your disk would become very fragmented very fast.

Supposedly Mt Ranier will fix all of these oddities when windows supports it, which may not be until Longhorn. I have read in several places M$ never plans to support it in XP. But with Longhorn delayed yet again I'm hoping they will release something like a "Windows XP second edition" and add in some of these newer technologies. Perhaps similiar to what they did with Win98 or maybe even Me. I just hope it works better!

[Roadfish]

He's using the writing capabilities built into XP.

[Tuf]

Since data burned on to a CDRW is not dynamic like on a hard drive I think it's normal behavior. Someone else may know away around it but even then I don't think it's a good idea. It's better to work with files on your hard drive where the application can make all temp files it needs and then trash them we you save and close the file.

[reboot]

A CDRW is treated like a CDR in this respect. Sure, you can reformat and then fill it up again, but you cannot simply overwrite stuff. I know of no way to do that.