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Now I know this doesn't seem possible with a cd-rom and it's not! Cd-rom drives are read-only and CDR's are also read-only.
My Idea: A driver that sits directly on top of your existing cd-rom driver. This driver would be transparent to the user but what it would do is allow a cd-rom to "appear"
to be a read-write device. What the driver would actually do is whenever a change to the cd-rom file system is made, the driver would catalog the files that were changed to a database of some kind that resides on the hard drive. The files would appear as the changed versions on the cd-rom and not the actual files.
Why is this good?
What originally caused me to think of this is outlook offline pst folders. These are .pst files that act as mailbox folders that outlook uses that can be opened through outlook as folders. I (as the administrator of a medium size business) at one time had backed up large pst files to cd-roms for many users only to find that pst files require a read/write medium to work. Even read-only access requires a read/write medium for whatever reason microsoft did this. The driver's proposed use in this fashion kind of defeats having pst files on a cd-rom because it will store it on the hd anyway. The way around this is the driver should have settings which can control the lifespan of the cache on the hard drive (eg: live forever, 1-day, on user logoff, on system shutdown, On eject)
Also... Running applications or games from a cd-rom. Most of the time with apps and games, there are only a very few files that actually change such as .ini files, .cfg files, save game files and other things of that nature. In this case you would want to set the lifespan of the driver's cache library to infinite.
My e-mail is: max('at')nationwidepp.com.
(Replace the ('at') with a @ symbols - an anti-spider technique)
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Annotation:
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Fake CD-Rs would be an interesting way for beginners to catalog files. Put the "Artwork" disc into the drive, to see all your Artwork files. However, it's also NOT good for beginners, who will associate that blank (or out-dated) CD with actual files. |
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Put those .pst files onto the hard drive. There's no reason for them to be on a CD-R. You can't transport the "fake CD-ROM" to another system, and the CD-Rs are not backups. |
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//Running applications or games from a cd-rom//
Most games or applications expect files to be in certain directories. The "fake CD-R driver" must account for this -- it's quite a feat of programming.
This is similar to Virtual CD programs. Those will copy the entire contents of a CD to the Hard drive, and treat that set of files as a new system drive. If it also allowed write access, it would be just like this idea, except you don't need the CD anymore. |
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Actually, i remember there was software like that some time ago - i can't remember the name nor the company that made it, but i'm pretty sure i worked just the way you wrote. |
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This is such a bad idea on so many levels... start with not having a clue where your actual data really resides and go from there. |
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Further, the use of the word "driver" is really incorrect as this idea is written, but I'll let that slide since I can only give it one bone anyway. |
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Must be good, because it passed about a thousand miles above my head. Some people really understand
how magic works ! . I once used CD's to discourage
incontinent birds from using my plane as target and
that's the extent of my knowledge about CD's. See,
those shiny circular flat things you push into your
PC, know what I mean?. Deflated bun. |
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Okay, so I started to say this is baked,
but then I thought about it and there's
nothing quite like this that I know of. |
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To clarify, and correct me if I'm wrong,
the idea is to use the CD-ROM data as
the fixed "BASE" for a set of data, and
any changes on the hard drive. When
you mount the CD-ROM again, the
software remebers all the changes. If
you only need to change 1 meg of a
600 meg CD, this would be useful. |
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Running apps from CD-ROM is not a
good use. Better to just teach your apps
to work that way. Why put the tiny data
on the CD if you can't take it with you? |
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The uses for this are limited in today's
world of cheap hard drives. But it's
relatively solid. |
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