As it is already known, the Mt Rainier Group (Compaq, Microsoft, Philips and Sony), propose an open industry standard for making CD-RW easier to use by enabling OS support and increasing compatibility and performance. The name of the new standard was named after Mount Rainier in the US state of Washington at the foot of which Microsoft has its headquarters.

The Mt Rainier format is mainly applied to general storage data applications, or "Drag&Drop on CD-RW". However, writing data (Drag&Drop) on CDs is currently not supported by any operating system. The functionality is currently handled by special applications that need to be installed on the PC running the drive. New CD-RW discs need to be formatted before data files can be written to them. The objective of the Mt Rainier solution is to overcome these issues by enabling native OS support of the drives and allowing CD-RW to be used as a "Drag&Drop" device by choice.

The main elements of the Mt Rainier format are the physical defect management by the drive, the logical write addressing at 2K, the background formatting, the command set implementation and the compatibility and standards-compliance. All the Mt Rainier CD-ROM / CD-RW drives should be compliant to those specifications.

Currently the UDF 1.5 file-system used in Drag&Drop applications handles defect management. The Mt Rainier proposal for adding physical defect management into the drive, allows more commonality with standard data-drives (DVD, MO…).

The logical addressing capability of the storage devices is also an important factor. The Mt Rainier functionality has defined 2K logical addressing as a mandatory support requirement for drives.

The Mt Rainier specification allow user to Drag&Drop data within seconds after insertion and spin-up of the disc. The disc formatting process occurs in the background, and the Drag&Drop data storage tasks should get priority above process of "de-icing" and "finalization", by the drive.

For a Mount Rainier compliant drive, implementing a mandatory command-set for data-use is required (fitting the MMC-2 structure).