CDRW : how 2 determine free space ?

Hello friends !

New user on your nice forum

I'm a french VC++ developer and I have a problem...apologizes for my poor english; do not hesitate to teach me if necessary.

I'm writing a small app used to backup dental images onto a ZIP (no problem) / JAZZ (no problem) / CD-RW (BIG problem !!!).

I would like to know how to determine the free space on the CD-RW and how to write on it (my users have WinXP and directCD by default).

I tried to search this forum for keywords like "rewritable", "cdrw", "IsCdrw" and so on but without success

I cannot get the free space thanks to GetDiskFreeSpaceEx() - as we do for a hdd for instance - while the explorer give me 656 Mb...
I continue to search through the MSDN and Internet; many thanks for your support

With kind regards.

Turbo Fredo - To support my racing team, please visit my team or my homepage. Many thanks

cd writing is a hard topic. up to some years ago, every writer needed its own driver. and even worse, they did not come with windows drivers, they built drivers for specific burning programs only!

today most are compatible to MMC or MMC2, thus making it much easier to handle them. but still not an easy task.

if you know your program will only run on windows XP, you´re lucky. it supports MMC writers by default installation. and there should be a SDK or client to the "cd-writer" service.
if not, you should buy a CD-Writer library eg. from Goldenhawk. this will save you 5 years of development

sorry that i cannot be more specific on the windows XP thing. did you search www.google.com and http://msdn.microsoft.com ?

what is this "directCD"? is it a third-party software? then you also should search on their homepage. maybe they supply a SDK too...

Thanks a lot for your reply M.Hirsch !

Yes I tried with google / msdn (I have a subscription) but...

While the meantime I found and tried SHGetDiskFreeSpace() - very similar to GetDiskFreeSpaceEx() - but I get only the "non-free" (sorry, I don't know the english words for this) space for the moment. I had to improve my skills but this way (SHell functions) could be interesting to determine the free space.

"directCD"? is a third-party software (from adaptec, included in EasyCdCreator) allowing you to burn (or prepare the burning) with a simple drag & drop from explorer window for instance. It works on different OS and is included into WinXP as a standard component. Regarding the writing process, I think I'm going to use SHGetSpecialFolderLocation() / SHGetSpecialFolderPath() to get the special folder use to prepare the writing (WinXP specific) to avoid many years of development .

Many, many thanks for your support !

Turbo Fredo - To support my racing team, please visit my team or my homepage. Many thanks