Transferring from one cd to another

[manning]

I never gave this a thought before

I have a laptop with one cd/dvd bay.

Normal procedure is to put cd to be copied into the bay and press copy. The info is read into the computer, then you have to take the cd out and put in the cd you want it copied to.

Can you get an external cd/dvd writer/reader then put the cd you want to copy into the laptop bay and have it copy directly over to the cd in the external cd/dvd writer??

 

[AZ JazzyJ]

Yes you can. I recently picked up an external DVD burner that included LightScribe and was able to copy from the internal laptop drive to the DVD burner without any issue. The 20x speed on the external drive made short work of copying between the two drives and I noticed only minor impact on CPU usage during the copy. With Blu-Ray just starting to gain a foothold you should be able to find an external DVD burner for an inexpensive price.

 

[Groucho]

This was a big no-no back when burners would fail the instant their buffers would run dry. Nowadays, it should be safe as burners can safely pause burning. But I still wouldn't recommend doing this, I'd go with it copying the original disc to the hard drive then burning back to a disc. Especially if your drive has any problem reading the original disc.

If you do do it, I would burn at a slightly slower than normal speed. But then, I think it's generally a good idea to burn a little slower than your drive's max speed anyway.