Background Formatting

Background Formatting is the function that enables you to use PCs for other operations while the drive is internally physically formatted. It takes about 30 minutes to format completely with MP5120. In order to enable background formatting either Nero or Bs Recorder GOLD must be installed.

You can copy files/folders onto a DVD+RW disc even when the drive is still background-formatting as long as the packet writing software finishes its formatting process. With the packet writing build-in eject function, you can eject a disc in one of the following modes before completing Background format.

1. Enable to be read by DVD+RW and DVD-ROM drives by writing temporary lead-ins onto the disc. It takes about one minute to eject the disc.
2. Enable to be read only by DVD+RW drives without writing any lead-ins onto the disc. When you select [Eject] via the Explorer or the PC shuts down, the disc will be readable only with DVD+RW drives because no lead-ins are written onto it. Physical format will be automatically starting again when the disc is inserted.

When you first insert a DVD+RW media it shows up as "Unformatted". The drive will auto format the media when not used, needs around 24mins to complete. After the format is over you will be able to use the disc for any task. In our case we simply wrote upon the media without any previous process and after the succeful ending of our task we did playback the DVD movie without any problems.

However inside Nero we saw that our disc formatting has stopped, due to the fact that we have burned our data. Nero gives the option to continue formatting:

In order the disc to be able to recognized from other DVD-ROMS the formatting must continue:

After formatting has finished, DVD+RW media can be used anywhere: