I've been getting the error message when trying to mount a rwcd that it is write-protected and is mounted as read-only. The cd is empty. I'm able to erase it with cdrecord and, I assume I could also write to it.

I want to read and write to it like a floppy.

Help appreciated.

I should add that I've been trying to backup my system and have created an iso image but am not sure how to create a bootable cd containing the image.

Any info appreciated.

The issue here is that CD-RWs, while they are rewritable, are still mounted read-only by the system. You can only write to them with a burning program such as K3B, you can't mount them like a floppy or USB drive and arbitrarily copy files to it.

Interesting idea ... not really possible ... at least with a regular CD-RW.

Hmmm ... it would be interesting to make such an interface. But, you'd probably need a multisession disk, and you would append to it when you wrote files to it. But, what happens if they exceed the holding capacity of the disk ? Then you'd have to wipe the disk and start over (there would be some type of check for this, so you don't waste time burning something that will fail). Technically it is possible, but it wouldn't be much faster than you doing it with a burning program, and you'd need a multisession disk.

That IS unfortunate. I have the same situation but hadn't gotten around to asking yet, but did come to the same conclusion. I have an RW disc formatted like a floppy with FAT-32, but can only use it as such with Windoze, which I no longer have installed
Hopefully there's a linux burner as simple, effective and efficient as Infra-Recorder, for making bootable ISO's. I haven't tried burning discs yet under linux, but did pull my hair for a while figuring out the un-writeable re-writeable issue..

You can't directly write to cd, because standalone files cannot be removed from cd, so it can't work as floppy or usb.

To mount use this
mount /dev/cdrom (as well can be /dev/hdc or /dev/hda and so on) /mnt/cdrom (where cdrom is directory in mnt) -t vfat. If vfat doesn't work, try msdos instead. And k3b is a great burner.