hambone

Thanks for the response...I still don't understand why I can download an application like CDuke3 and without any configuration, it recognizes that I have put a DVD +RW disk in my drive and proceeds to write to it, no problem. Is it talking directly to the drive firmware? If not, is it talking to the driver? Is it doing writes through the driver? If so, the file driver should be able to do so as well and provide full access to the drive. Also, does the driver sits on top of some protocol ala SCSI or IDE. I know that SCSI provides a nice abstract interface to the device. I suspect IDE does the same. I wrote a couple of NT device drivers a few years ago on top of a protocol called SBP - much like SCSI - but for 1394/firewire devices. I have been out of the biz for a few years so I am ignorant of what's out there today but this situation baffles me viz what I think I know about devices and device drivers...of course a little knowledge can be dangerous!

But isn't "burning" just another word for writing...And if an application can write(burn) to the disk, why couldn't a device driver...after all, a device driver is just software. I guess the question is whether the drive itself can detect the media type and then provide a mechanism for the driver to interrogate it. If that is possible, then a robust device driver that fits in the appropriate driver stack should be no problem.

I recently bought a dvd rw drive and am stunned that I apparently can't use it as a general purpose storage device. Instead I apparently need to use special purpose applications to do file writes. Is this true? And if so, can anyone tell me why Windows XP does not suppport cd/dvd read/write devices as general storage devices? Why is it that we can do typical file operations on a flash device (thumb drive) etc, that we can't do the same operations (write) on an optical device. It seems like all that is needed is a device driver that provides the functionality required by the upper level file driver.