DVD RW Not Clearing

aardvaak

I have a DVD RW disc with some back up files on it that I no longer need - for some reason they have stored on the disc as read only - I have right clicked on them and removed the instruction - and tried to erase the disc but the files wont erase, the files just default back to read only.

Has anyone any ideas what to do/what has gone wrong

Belnahua

DVD RW (and CD RWs) are notorious for becoming unreliable. I don't even recommend people using them. For the price of DVD/CD R's, it's worth just treating them as disposable.

The best thing to do (apart from chuck them all away and never use RWs again!) is to clean them. Usually it's a tiny scratch or piece of dirt near the centre.

fwor

Have you tried opening a Command Prompt and deleting them from there?

You could also use the "attrib -r" command to try unsetting the read-only attribute if they still won't delete.

aardvaak

fwor wrote: »

Have you tried opening a Command Prompt and deleting them from there?

You could also use the "attrib -r" command to try unsetting the read-only attribute if they still won't delete.

How do I do this?

fwor

Assuming you know how to open a Command Prompt, and that your CD/DVD writer is the drive, type

attrib -r d:\*.*
del d:\*.*

Does that get rid of them?

bingo_bango

Assuming you don't know how to, go to START, then RUN, and type command.com then hit ENTER.

jje_2

If you are using Nero then Nero tools
Nero CD DVD Speed
Extra
Erase disc .
But as posted before RW is very unreliable and seems to have got worse with the increase in speeds of burners .
jje

Conor_3

I wonder if the OP actually created the DVDRW as a normal data disc instead of using packet writing. If that's the case, you'd have to do what jje has said.

Alternatively, DVDRW discs are pennies now so just snap the thing in half and go get another.

esuhl

I have never had much success with DVD-Rs. DVD-RAMs were an even worse idea: it took 7 or 8 hours to format a few discs, 3 or 4 hours to run a backup (swapping discs as needed), then after finding that the discs were corrupt... another several hours to format, several hours to backup... and the same happened again. Argh!!!!

Save them up as cheap stress toys, and snap them with delight!

Stompa

Have you tried reformatting the disk? (After copying off any files that you want to keep fo course).

aardvaak

fwor wrote: »

Assuming you know how to open a Command Prompt, and that your CD/DVD writer is the drive, type

attrib -r d:\*.*
del d:\*.*

Does that get rid of them?

Sorry to take so long coming back tried above in command prompt it just said access denied