One factor that you might want to look at:  Older CD-ROM
drives would work reliably only with certain colors of CD
disks.  The silver could be universally read while the blue
or gold were specific to certain readers.  It had something
to do with the sensitivity of the detectors to certain
frequencies of reflected light.

All that said, I do think that your problem stems from the
file format that you are put on your disks.  Almost all
early CDROM Readers (Read only) would not read CD's that
had CDRW formats.  Your statement that you formatted the
CDR and CDRW's before writing to them makes me think that
they are indeed R-W format.  If I remember correctly, we
had to "close" the CDR's to prevent more writing before we
could read them in the older CDR players.  I haven't seen
these issues with the newer CDR players.

Doug

At 8/2/2002 06:37 AM, Larry Stewart wrote:

What is the determining factor on whether a CD-ROM drive
will read or even
recognize a CD/R or CD/RW?

Here's the reason for my question. I had made a number of
CD/Rs and CD/RWs
on a WIN98 machine using a 16/10/40a PlexWriter. A new
WIN98 machine with an
old "HEX-Speed" Creative Labs CD-ROM would not recognize
the backed up file
data on either media. As well, it would not recognize an
MP-3 music CD/R
made with the same application (Easy CD Creator 5
Platinum). For the backed
up file data, the CD/Rs and CD/RWs were formatted first
before the data was
written to it using Easy CD Creator. ....

However it will recognize both file data and MP3 music --
if they were made
under the auspices of the "Make a Data CD project" option
of Easy CD
Creator.

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