Whenever I plug in my external CD Drive, it will read a cd or a writable CD that has any sort of item on but it will not read empty writable CDs. It tells me my external CD Drive is plugged in, though.
Im running openSUSE 11.1.
If the CD drive is empty, what are you trying to read?
The CD Drive isn’t empty, the CD itself is empty.
It is more than empty. Part of the burning process is to put an empty filesystem onto the CD, then to add files to it. A CD with an empty filesystem is read as a CD with no files. A CD with no filesystem is not recognisable as anything meaningful.
At least, that is how I understand it. I can see a debate coming up about whether this is correct behaviour. I think that it is right that the CD with no filesystem is treated differently to the CD with a filesystem but no files. But what the ideal behaviour is for a CD with no filesystem, I am not sure.
No, that’s not how it works. A CD is written in one go, so the filesystem image has to be prepared ahead of time. So you can’t write the filesystem skeleton and then add files to it in separate steps.
However there is a difference between a blank CD and a CD with a filesystem with no files. A blank CD has never been written to and can still be used. You would have a useless CD in the second case and it cannot be changed (we’re talking about ordinary data CD-Rs and not variations like CD-RW (which can be erased), multi-session, packet writing, etc).