Buddy of mine told me this today.

A friend comes to his place over the weekend. He's got a fancy SLR camera and a Vista laptop. Buddy takes a bunch of pictures, then hands him a generic CD-R. Friend connects the camera to his laptop to transfer the pictures and then burns them on the CD-R.

Buddy takes CD to his XP computer, but it comes up like it's a blank CD-R. Brings the CD back to the friend, put it back into the vista laptop, and images are there.

Brings the CD into the office today, and none of our systems (all XP) can see any files on it. Drive Properties shows a reduced disk capacity, but that's the only hint that something is on the disk. One guy even boots a virtual instantance of Vista on his XP system, but still shows no files.

So what's the deal?

Does Vista use some weird file system for burning files to a data CD-R ???

UDF maybe? Might be a new feature in Vista and it wasn't noticed when burning. Check on that (don't have Vista, but sounds reasonable). May just need a UDF-reading software put on XP. Don't know if IsoBuster would reveal that or not (trial version available I think).

Note - Virtual usually uses the true interface (correction anyone?) from the host system, so...

Yep, UDF inconsistency confirmed -
http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPo...2&SiteID=17

If this is the Vista UDF 2.5 issue, you can download these drivers (might require special hardware you don't have) UDF 2.5 drivers for XP at:
http://files.digital-digest.com/downloads/...P-BluePrint.rar

What did he use to burn the CD, a 3rd party app or Window's built in CD writing?

It's possible he burnt a cheap CD (ex: Memorex) on a LiteOn burner (a cheap crappy overrated burner) and now normal burners can't see it. I have many CDs/DVDs that are unusable because they were Memorex discs burnt by a LiteOn burner, the combination seems fatal.

Don't bash Lite-On. They're the only optical drives still kicking in my rigs. I agree on the Memorex discs though, they had a bad batch which fried a couple of my old LG CDRWs - after burning those they would only burn at 8x regardless of media.

OK, so let me get this straight.

Vista uses a proprietary file format for burning files to recordable optical media, and is not offering a driver for XP to be able to read them?????

Is this common knowledge?

Is it similar to Roxio's Direct-CD or Nero's IN-CD ???

Is there really no driver for XP?