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Well, i guess blank=fast only deletes the FAT part of the disk, so in fact you're overwritting the CD.
blank=all i suppose physically deletes the data by making a flat layer on the disc, so it is as it has no data in it.
This is only a guessing, but it seems reasonably to me
how many times (aprox.) would i be able to do a "blank=fast" compared to a "blank-all"???
i've been blanking a cd-rw with "blank=fast" quite a few times with no problems, but i had another one that i used with "blank=all" and i was only able to do that a few times before the cd died...
I really don't know...i suppose it depends on each CD, but i really have no idea. Sorry. Maybe in the homepage of the manufacturer you can find the answer
AFAIK, when you burn a CD you're actually doing small holes on the disk with the laser beam. I guess that blank=all what does is remove those holes by making the CD flatter, so you can do it 32 times before the laser beam is able to do more "holes" on the surface of the disk.
Distribution: Slackware 10.0|Damn Small Linux|NetBSD|Debian
Posts: 46
Rep:
Re: how many times can you blank a cd-rw disc???
Quote:
Originally posted by win32sux Well, i guess blank=fast only deletes the FAT part of the disk, so in fact you're overwritting the CD.
blank=all i suppose physically deletes the data by making a flat layer on the disc, so it is as it has no data in it.
This is only a guessing, but it seems reasonably to me
blank=fast overwrites the TOC and the pregap, blank=all overwrites the entire disk, which is why it takes 30 minites as opposed to the 2 minites of blank=fast.
(look at the cdrecord man page, i basically paraphrased it)
but to the how many times thing, i dont know, all i know is that I dont use blank=all except when the disk has read/write errors, then it fixes it.... but for just blanking a disk i use blank=fast, which just deletes the "superblock" so the computer reading it wont be able to read the filesystem (under normal circumstances, there are forensics tools out there that can do it (i assume))
so yeah, blank=fast can be used quite a lot, when it starts to kill the disk you'll see it because you will start to lose data on the disk, writing quality will get poor, and sometimes (esp. if you have a bad cd drive), you wont be able to mount the disk at all.....
EDIT: lol i quoted the wrong post...
EDIT 2: mmmm..... i tried to fix it and i did the same post again..... that earns me a newbie smilie face....
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