rickmay wrote:
>
> I have an application that needs to be able to write large amounts of
> data to a CD-R/W drive. Currently I am forcing the user to run some
> third party software to format a CD-R before running my program. I
> would like to be able to format the CD through labview. I would also
> like to be able to read and write the 11 character disk label. I'm
> sure that this can be done using the windows SDK but I'm not that
> familiar with it and have had no luck finding the routines that I
> need. Any assistance or ideas would be greatly appreciated.
CD-RW drives are not natively supported in Windows 2000 or earlier.
(Apparently they are supported in Windows XP.)
From our experience on many high-quality Dells with good Adaptec
software and r
easonable drives, CDs are best used to copy files at the
OS level.
LabVIEW doesn't know about a drive beyond the information that Windows
makes available to it, and surely doesn't know about formatting CD-RW.
Furthermore, writing directly to CD is risky; there is a good chance of
buffer underruns (data unavailable when the CD-RW needs it), in which
case you corrupt the CD & your data are gone.
If the drive is too slow for the media, you get similar problems; we've
seen it write unreadable CDs.
So stick with the third party software, and don't touch the drive in
LabVIEW. It may be able to use Get Volume Information to get the label.
Stream your data to hard disk (which is fast and reliable), and prompt
the user to use commercial software to backup the files as needed.
Best, Mark
