CD/RW NT Service

[peter condos]

At Present I have a NT Server Holding all customer data. My tech and I have been trying to develop a way to use the CD/RW as a removable storage device acting as a share across the network to be randomly accessed by all workstations for amendments to my customer drawings.

The inital idea is to develop a cataloging system so any updates required or modifications to the drawings which have been archived can be easyily updateded via all clients in a user friendly and effcient manner. ( Not having to spend the time copying and reburning the cataloged Cd. Even if it is a CD/RW. ) Also we believe as a security issue, it would minimize the chance of using a superceeded drawing.


At Present we have toyed around with DirectCD Version 3 from adaptec. Finding it to be a fairly reliable system locally, but accessing it via network causes ( In this case Workstation platform is Windows98 ) the whole operating system to crash in one big fatal exception. My techy believes accessed via the same platform Eg: WORKSTATION -> NT SERVER it would work sucessfully. I believe a successful attempt was made using 2 NT SERVERS.

Updating DirectCD to version 4 created more hassles. As my tech believes it is not as reliable as version 3 or less stable.

Restrictions using this software and method of archiving is the CD's themselves are unrelible to be read in a standard CD-ROM

Again Techy believes this can be rectified by using the UDF reader adaptec supplies. This has not been tested as such as the project was slightly abandoned due to technical difficulty!!!! >8^}

My main question is. Has anyone attempted to run such a system for this purpose, or similar.

Is there any other software that does the same function?

Could " ART " maybe supply us with some ideas???? or suggestions?

[Wakes2]

I can't answer your server questions but I will make a statement about Windows 98. I to use DirectCD and recently updated to DirectCD to version 4 because of Windows 98se2. W98se2 will not write to CD-RW's that were formated with any version below 4. Windows 98 first addition will.
I have an HP8200 series CD-RW and had to call HP when I updated to W98se2. The information above is what they told me. I was unable to write to the CD-RW's that were formated with DirectCD 3 after the upgrade, just as they said. In addition Version 4 won't close any CD-R that were left open with Version 3 using W98se2. What a pain. Hope this helps.
One other comment, the CD-RW have a maximum rewrite of about 1,000 times. So if one area of the disk is re-writen to alot, be ware.

Bill Wakefield