Love the wind chime idea. I want something to keep the birds out of my tomatoe and that may work. I am also kicking around a larger project idea! I have to build new raised garden beds next year so I just may start collecting old CDs/DVDs from friends that would otherwise end up in landfills and doing a mosaic mural on the raised bed sides!! It may end up not being anything great or it may be really pretty........we'll see!!

Sorry about that Randy, I looked in My Computer- Properties-Hardware and below is the information that I see in the box. All disk drives. Name Disk Drive. WDC WD120JB-75CRAO Disk Drives. Floppy Disc Drive Floppy Disk. HL-DT-ST-DVDRAM GSA 40440B DVD/CD-R. HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GSA 4163B DVD/CD-R. Now the amazing thing is. After going in there a zillion times over the last two days, looking for possible problems and not finding anything amiss. The CD-ROM on Drive E has decided to function as it did before. I have burned three documents onto a CD-R and checked them out and it worked. Don't ask me why, as I have no idea what happened to cure the problem. I now find however, that the other CD-ROM drive on Drive F [not D as I first named it] does not function at all, either playing or burning. "Horton"

The +/- formats are competition generated like the recent DVD contest which BlueRay won, or even farther back the beta vs VHS conflict. Today most DVD units read and/or write both formats. My most recent reading reported minus was the more prevalent of the two. Personally I do not like any RW to use for permanent storage. I have to at times use copied video, audio and text at work. Several times a year RWs which have been rewritten on several times fail; CD and DVD. Not too often, but they do fail. Without knowing what brand and model of DVD burner along with the software you intend to use, my initial position is as long as the disk is amendable you should be able to continue using it for additional storage. DA

Yes it reads. I installed this version of ubuntu on it,and I can view a photo disc. Disk utility shows it but has a dash beside write cache. K3B shows it,but says error beside write. cat/proc/sys/dev/cdrom/info: drive name: sr0 drive speed: 52 drive # of slots: 1 Can close tray: 1 Can open tray: 1 Can lock tray: 1 Can change speed: 1 Can select disk: 0 Can read multisession: 1 Can read MCN: 1 Reports media changed: 1 Can play audio: 1 Can write CD-R: 0 Can write CD-RW: 0 Can read DVD: 0 Can write DVD-R: 0 Can write DVD-RAM: 0 Can read MRW: 1 Can write MRW: 1 Can write RAM: 1 no ndiswrapper I honestly don't know what I'm using that allows me to use the driver. Maybe I can't? How would I get a linux driver? I am up to date on all kernel updates as far as I know. I thought maybe I just needed to add something else like a destination for the file? If I can't get it figured out I will try ubuntu forums. Thanks for your help chuggerguy!