John,
Since you normally are the one answering questions instead of asking
them, I am happy to answer one of yours. A writable CDROM drive is a
special drive in Windows, and normally is not seen the same way as a
hard drive or floppy drive. There are many technical reasons for this
but basically the best answer is that when it first came into use it was
only seen as a special device to read from and not write to. Because
CDROM writing formats were designed by more dedicated machines they
created their on format such as Joilet or ISO 9600 or something like
that or Kodak PhotoCD ect. However that was also a good thing because
formats are usally cross platform compliant. A CD properly written on a
Mac can be read by Windows and vice versa. Because Microsoft does own
this spec they probably won't include in windows. Therefore general
write I/O's will normally not see the device as writable.
You stated you wanted to backup your hard drive with Windows Backup.
DON'T even think about this. Use the software that came with your CD
Write drive (usally Adaptec's Easy CD Creator). Windows Backup uses an
algorithm only Windows can decompress. So if your system crashs your
Backup created disk is useless without having Windows. My suggestion is
to obviously not compress anything. Just a directory by directory
transfer. Then make sure your system can boot off a CD. Windows Backup
was designed when a large hard drive was 120mb. It's a joke by todays
standards.
Hope I helped.
Phillip
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