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CD Writing Howto

13) BLANKING A CD-RW

The whole point of using a CD-RW is that it is REwritable. In other words, you can erase it and burn something else onto it. It only just occurred to me that I should make an addition to this howto, explaining briefly how to do this!

It's very simple in fact. The blank=.... option is what you need to use:

# cdrecord dev=2,0,0 speed=4 -v blank=fast

There are several keywords you can use after "blank=", not all of which are useable on all drives. The man page for cdrecord has this to say:

      blank=type
              Blank  a  CD-RW  and  exit  or blank a CD-RW before writing. The
              blanking type may be one of:

              help        Display a list of possible blanking types.

              all         Blank the entire disk. This may take a long time.

              fast        Minimally blank the disk. This  results  in  erasing
                          the PMA, the TOC and the pregap.

              track       Blank a track.

              unreserve   Unreserve a reserved track.

              trtail      Blank the tail of a track.

              unclose     Unclose last session.

              session     Blank the last session.
       Not  all  drives support all blanking types. It may be necessary to use
       blank=all if a drive reports a specified command as being invalid.   If
       used  together  with  the -force flag, this option may be used to blank
       CD-RW disks that otherwise cannot be blanked. Note that you may need to
       specify  blank=all  because  some drives will not continue with certain
       types of bad CD-RW disks. Note also that cdecord does it's best if  the
       -force  flag  is  used  but  it finally depends on the drive's firmware
       whether the blanking operation will succeed or not.

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