i'm so irked i don't know where to begin.
anyway i am preparing my hard drive for a repartition and reinstall of my OS.
i have burned a block of C-Rs last night and this morning. approx. 8.
therein lies part of my problem. i have inadvertently set my burner to a default of multi session discs. it closes the session but leaves the disc open. as i burn each disc i delete the data from the drive.

what effect is this going to have reading the discs under the new install? the data shows up in explorer under the current install.
i have burned WAAAAAY more than 8 discs under this default, 8 just happens to be my last block. i have no idea where the rest are, in a box, 1 of 7. each one holds about 400 discs.
how can i close these discs without adding another session?

It's a little difficult to say what it's going to do without testing. What you could do is try copying one of the CD's into a ISO format, then use something like Daemontools or Poweriso (A virtualrom) to try and access the ISO file as a disc.

If it can't be accessed then you might have some problems, in the sense that you might have to turn your test onto one of your real discs. If that's the case I really hope you've indexed what's on each one, so you can pick one with things that can be re-downloaded or are unnecessary.

What ever you try though, please make sure you tell us the results in the post so it can be here for future reference for people that do exactly the same. (I did it once when someone wanted a copy of a Phone number library some years back, the guy wasn't impressed when he got home and couldn't pull up phone numbers from his copy. Although I was pretty chuffed, I didn't think a disc filled full of numbers in his hands was necessarily a good idea anyway.)

It's a little difficult to say what it's going to do without testing. What you could do is try copying one of the CD's into a ISO format, then use something like Daemontools or Poweriso (A virtualrom) to try and access the ISO file as a disc.

when i put one of the CDs in the drive and open explorer the files show up.
can i just copy from the disc onto the desktop or a folder and try to run it from there? or recopy it to a CD-R and close the disc and see if it works?
like i said, each session is closed but the disc is open to add more files.
i could add one avatar to the 8 discs i have then close them but what about the others? i will eventually run across them.

all of the contents came from the web. most will be painless to replace some will take a little digging but it also can be replaced. i would imagine that very little is "irreplaceable"

What you could do is try to identify what drivers, files and registries are all linked to the program you used for making the Session CD's.

If you can identify them then you could take a copy of all them and their layout, so when you do a reinstall you just make sure you re-register the right keys in the registry, have the program put in program files and any temporary lock files or config files that are also linked with the program to the clean install.

I've done this a few times with other programs that were purchased and registered but the details weren't known, only the encoded files that activated the products etc.

i've been looking online for some help. i've googled the phrase "retrieving data from open multisession CDs" and got a good start. most, if not all of the software is either shareware, or you must outright buy it. this gives me hope. i will stop by staples and check them out. they are supposed to be pretty good.

i've tried to access these CDs from true DOS with no luck. this leads me to believe they would be unaccessible under a new OS.

i really don't know what to make of this.
the files on this block of 8 CDs will show and execute on a fresh install of winME and a fresh install of winXP, but will not show in DOS.
Hmmmm . . . .

Open cd session does not an unreadable cd make.

DOS is ancient.

Open cd session does not an unreadable cd make.

DOS is ancient.
the sessions are closed. it's the CD itself that is open. (not finalized)
anyway i've been able to read them in winME and a fresh install of XP.

i assume that they wasn't recorded in standard 8.3 format readable in DOS. also some of the folder names have spaces in them.

Yes, I meant not finalized, sorry.