Dear CD freaks,

I am trying to use HP's DLA "drive letter access" software to access CDRW's like floppys. I have a lot of problems formatting blank CDRWs with the DLA software (more details below on this). My question is: can I use CloneCD to copy a successfully formatted DLA disk, then write the image to a new blank CDRW as a way of working around the flaky DLS format procedure?

I have an HP 9100i CD-RW drive and Windows XP Pro, 1.8 Ghz p4, 512 Ram.

Here is a more detailed description of the problem I have using DLA to format blank disks: When I right-click the CD drive and choose format, my system hangs for 30 sec before the DLA format window opens. When I try to format, I almost always get a message saying "format failed due to general failure" at some point during the process - sometimes at the very end after about 20 min. During the format, my CPU usage jumps to 100% and stays there - another sign that this software is not agreeing with my system. According to Nero's info tool, DMA is enabled on my CDRW drive (although I cannot access this setting through windows because no "advanced" tab appears under "properties." I think this has to do with some characteristic of my BIOS.)

I have tried different media to no avail, and have also removed second CD drive from the IDE channel. The strange thing is that sometimes, god knows why, the format succeeds and then I am able to use the disk perfectly without a problem.

I thought there might be some conflict with windows integrated (roxio) burning utility, but I haven't been able to find any clear info on this.

Thanks for reading!

zinspace

try using nero's InCD to format your disks. If you have nero infotool, I would guess you have nero also. InCD is a part of this package. If not, you can find it on www.nero.com to download.

Hope this helps