UDF disc problems

[Nostalgia]

Story: I used like 20 DVD discs to back up my hard drives data a few months ago to prepair for a complete system recovery since it was my only option to fix my random wireless adapter not working thing.

I formatted it to UDF (Universal Disc Format) to use it like a flash drive, or so it says...

 

 

Problem: I put in one of my discs earlier, which already had some of my old backed up data on it, to put some new stuff on it but it had no space left (around 40mb left on it) so I deleted what was on it...only it still had 40mb left...with nothing on the disc..

Its capacity is 4.7GB but it said it had 40MB of storage space remaining, so I went to format it and in the options it says its capacity is 57mb....WTF?

Its suppose to be a flash drive! not a disposable flash drive!

 

Am I doing something wrong here?

I need to store some new thing cos I've ran out of disk space and I don't want to delete anything..

[BeeCeeBee]

I formatted it to UDF (Universal Disc Format) to use it like a flash drive, or so it says...

When you say "use it like a flash drive" what do you mean. You cannot simply drag files onto a disk the way you would a flash drive. Nero and some other software will allow you to format a RW disc to simulate drag and drop using the software.

 

Basic live file format of a DVD should allow you to backup using Nero or other burning software. If the disk you formatted contained data and it is not RW all of the data will be gone and all that will show is the unused space from before. I believe that the same is true with a RW disc except that you will be left with the the full capacity of the disc.

Edited February 12, 2009 by BeeCeeBee

[Dalo Harkin]

If I am understanding right, you are referring to a DVD-RW - a dvd that you can put data on and if needed re write over the data.

I think that you are confusing a DVD-R (single use) with a DVD-RW (multi use)

other than that ALL disks will not burn right to the edge or they shouldnt as thats when issues arise a 4.7 GB DVD should only take around 4.4GB of DATA

 

Hope this helps, and if I have misunderstood, please detail more precisely

[Nostalgia]

Ah...I've just checked and they are DVD-R

Yes I did make them to be a live file system, but I guess them being DVD-R I could only do it once.

 

Thanks for the infor guys.

=)

[BeeCeeBee]

Well it is sorted anyway and you will know for next time.