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Well, I tried to burn some files to CD-R on my Vista laptop for the first time. I didn't look too closely at what I was doing on the first CD; I just accepted the defaults. It looks like Vista now defaults to burning a "live" CD in, apparently, UDF format. On the second CD, I looked more closely at what I was doing, and noticed the UDF thing. The instructions seemed to indicate that the CDs would be readable under XP, though, so I went ahead with the burn. When I tried the CDs on XP, though, they appeared to be blank. I tried them on the Mac, just for yuks, and they were totally unreadable. I did some digging, and I figured out that I can read them under XP if I have a proper UDF reader installed. Here's a Microsoft KB article on the subject. Digging a little deeper, it looks like maybe Vista uses a newer version of UDF that's incompatible with the UDF reading capabilities built into XP? After reading up a little more, I figured out that the latest Nero InCD would probably read the discs. I'd been meaning to upgrade my Nero install from 7.0 to 7.7 anyway, so I went ahead and did that, and made sure to install InCD. I can now read the discs. I wish Vista had made it clear that the discs wouldn't necessarily be readable under a normal XP install though.

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