Hi, I recently bought a new HP pavilion computer, and it has a cd/dvd reader and a cd/dvd writer. neither of these drives will take a cartridge.

I bought and installed a new Panasonic LF-M821 DVD MULTI-FORMAT drive connected to the computer with a firewire enclosure. I am running Windows XP Pro.

I have numerous Type 1 and type 2 DVD-RAM cartridges that I have used for system backups in the past. I would like to now reformat the disks and use them for data backup. I am not able to format them as I get a message that the disks are write protected. I have learned that some software will write protect these disks.

I would like to know what I have to do in order for me to remove the "write protect" from the disks so I can reformat them with UDF formatting.

Your assistance will be greatly appreciated.

I'm not sure that can work, but try to use Imgburn to do a full erase of these discs

Once discs are erased, try to use panasonic drivers to format discs in UDF

Panasonic DVD-RAM driver utility includes a tool named WPTool.exe.

According to documentation this tool can be used to enable or disable the Write-Protect in a DVD-RAM disk.

GB

I don't know what Imgburn is or where I can get it. Part of my problem is that when I installed the Panasonic Driver, it wound up in my E drive which is my internal DVD writer drive. My Panasonic drive is in M drive which is an external drive hooked up via a firewire enclosure.

You can get Imgburn here

It works also with drives connected to computer with USB/firewire

That may work, but for some reason, when I installed the Panasonic DVD-RAM driver it wound up in the E drive which is my internal DVD writer drive. The Panasonic DVD Multi-Format drive is in an External Firewire enclosure and is the M drive. Any Ideas how to get the M drive to see it?

If you rightclick the mouse over your M drive don't you get the format options?

Thanks, I downloaded it, and will let you know if it solves my problem. Thanks

Yes I do, but if I try to format, I get the message the disk is "write protected".

I installed Imgburn, and tried to erase a DVD-RAM cartridge, but was unsucessful. I appears to be quite an extensive program which will take me a while to learn, so I have not given up as yet. But I am still getting the "Write Protected" message.

It appears that I have had all the advice I am going to get on this thread, and I thanks all who have tried to help. I don't know how to terminate a thread, but I am trying to do so now.