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79: Erasing Rewritable CDs

A rewritable CD is a disk that can have data “burned” onto it and later have the data erased from the disk, allowing new data to be “burned” onto that same disk.

After you have “burned” data onto a rewritable CD, before you can “burn” new data onto that CD, you must first erase the existing data.

First, insert the rewritable disk. If the CD has data written on it, after a few seconds you will see the CD icon mount on the desktop and the title of the CD will be found directly underneath the CD icon. For example, if you CD was titled “Rewritable CD,” it would show up as in the picture below.



Once the Rewritable CD has mounted on the desktop, open the applications folder and find and open the Utilities folder within the Applications folder.



Next, open Disk Utility. Once the application is open, you should see a window that looks like the image below.



Select the top CD icon, which indicates the size of the CD. Now select the “Erase” tab at the top of the window in Disk Utility.

You now have 2 options: Quick Erase and Full Erase.

Quick Erase will erase the data in a short amount of time, allowing you to begin rewriting data onto the CD in just a few minutes.

Full Erase takes considerably longer, but completely removes data from the CD, making it unrecoverable. Depending on your preference, either check or uncheck the “Quick Erase” checkbox at the bottom of the Disk Utility window.

Once you have made this decision, click the “Erase” button. The data is now being erased from your CD.

Once the erasing process has been completed, a window should appear that reads “You inserted a blank CD,” just like the one below.



Click “OK.” You can now rewrite or “burn” new data onto this disk.

This article was last edited on Jul-02-2007 3:59 pm
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