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About the DVD:

  • DVD+R is printed on the disk, as well as - separately (!) - RW

enter image description here

I burned the 14.04 LTS *.iso on to that DVD in Win7, following standard procedure as listed on ubuntu.com

Should this DVD still be re-usable to burn other things on it? If so, how much of the original 4.7GB space should still be available for re-use?

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    If the question is too primitive, why not just answer y/n? (instead of silently down-voting) May 8, 2014 at 9:31
  • Blanking a CD/RW seems dated and only provides a hint, rather than a reliable and comprehensive doc. May 8, 2014 at 9:34
  • Your title is misleading. Is it DVD-R or DVD-RW? The former is not reusable, the latter is. Also it wouldn't hurt to Google a bit - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD
    – michy04
    May 8, 2014 at 9:36
  • Can the close voters explain themselves?
    – don.joey
    May 8, 2014 at 17:39
  • I can: This is not about Ubuntu; it is a hardware question :)
    – Rinzwind
    May 10, 2014 at 7:59

3 Answers 3

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If what you mean for the "separately" "RW" is something like this:

DVD +R

That means, literally, "The read-write characteristics of this disk are: DVD+R". Don't let the logo (the stylized RW) confound you.

So in this case you have a write-once media; you can't erase data.

The writable-once disks come in two flavors, DVD+R and DVD-R. Only the first ones allows you to add data if the disk is not full (multi-session).

So if you have a DVD+R disk, the general answer is "no, you can't" if you have closed the disk, or "yes, you can" use the rest of the capacity if you have not closed it by opening another session.

In this case, the answer is probably no, you can't because I think that the programs that write a bootable DVD also close the disk.

A real rewritable disc will have:

DVD+RW

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  • the top green picture is what it looks like indeed May 8, 2014 at 16:54
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Your "DVD+R" "RW" may be a DVD+RW, which is reusable:

The recording layer in DVD+RW and DVD-RW discs is a phase change metal alloy (often GeSbTe) whose crystalline phase and amorphous phase have different reflectivity. The states can be switched depending on the power of the writing laser, so data can be written, read, erased and re-written.

Officially speaking, there is no such thing as "DVD+R" "RW"; it sounds like one of the various shorthand terms, like DVD±R/±RW, that are commonly used to describe the different formats of disks.

The easiest way to test this is to try writing a new image to the disk.

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  • It is not a DVD+RW, see updated title and question. May 8, 2014 at 15:36
  • There is no such thing as a "DVD+R RW", but it might be a shorthand term for DVD+RW. Answer updated.
    – bain
    May 8, 2014 at 15:53
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Unlike DVD+RW discs, DVD+R discs can only be written to once. (...) This can cause confusion because the DVD+RW Alliance logo is a stylized 'RW'. Thus, a DVD+R disc may have the RW logo, but it is not rewritable.

Therefore the answer seems to be no: non-reusable (as in, non-rewritable), as has also been discussed in a previous SX Q&A.

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