Hello all

I have been trying to burn a clutch of photographs to a cd for the first time on my Dell Laptop using Vista.

I am using old cds (CD-RW) that I know are free and I have been using them to transfer photographs from an older PC so I know that laptop is able to read the cds. I have had to use the old PC to scan the photographs as my scanner is not supported by Vista.

However, when I come to burn the photographs I get a message that windows cannot complete the format or it hangs after taking forever to try to complete the format.

I have to admit I do not understand the process and thought I would be able to drag and drop as I have done with a flash drive. I did have Nero on my old PC but I cannot use that as I cannot get the photographs back to the PC from the laptop. I am fairly sure the old PC does not support a flash drive. Also the old PC does not have an Ethernet port.



I have spent days getting these photo's together for a friend and now I am not able to put them on a cd, can you help please?

My laptop is less than a year old. I hope I have given enough information and that someone can help me.

Thank you for reading.

Originally Posted by MilesAhead

Get Imgburn. Format the erasable disc(you only have to do it once in Imgburn.) Burn them just like you would a CDR. The old PC is using InCD. You are much better off to put all the photos in a folder making sure it will fit on one CD. Use Imgburn "Write Folders/Files to Disc" and select the folder with the photos. If Imgburn suggests changing the file system to another format just click OK.

Your other PC should be able to read the discs since they are standard CDR format. But with erasables there's no guarantees.

Many thanks MilesAhead is Imgburn free software? Also does that mean that Microsoft Vista burn software is not very good, just want to check if anyone thinks it's something I am not doing correctly.

Thank you again for taking the time to reply.

BD

Thank you MilesAhead, that's good to know it is free.

I will attempt it all later today and post when I am successful - fingers crossed

Many thanks for taking the time to post, it is appreciated.

DB

Originally Posted by MilesAhead

Imgburn is free.

Also I would set "Lock Volume Exclusive Access" as shown in the Screen Shot.
You get there by Tools=>Settings=>Write tab.

I don't know how good the built in CD burning is. I've been using Imgburn since XP SP1. I try to get my flavors of Windows working as much the same as possible. I find it distracting to remember which thing is in which place because it's on this flavor. I write a lot of my own utilities so that I can hit the same hotkey on all the flavors.

edit: I forgot to mention.. the reason you do that Imgburn setting is because when you try to start the burn, if Imgburn sees another app is trying to control the drive, it will pop up an error. It can be a good way to find out if you have 2 or 3 different apps fighting over which one controls the optical drive.