#1 Burning Software

hi,
I'm wondering if it's bad to write to dvd+rw without erasing it first. I burn a multiseession TAO joliet image, and then without erasing I burn another one (not using import image) basically overwriting the previous one without erasing the dvd first.

1. Is there anything wrong with this?
It save a lot of time since dvd+-rw erase takes quite a long time.

2. my 2nd question is about damaging dvd-ram. Today I bought dvd-ram for testing purposes and because I didnt know that dvd+rw and dvd-ram always return DISC_STATUS_INCOMPLETE my app started erasing it. After about 15 minutes I got fed up and pressed the eject key on my burned. Now my dvd-ram disc seems to be dead. I cant get it to work anymore.
is this possible?
is there a way to lock the drive door while performing these types of "dangerous" operations?

thank you

i just re-erased dvd-ram disc and it took 40 minutes with my panasonic matchita uj-845s slim drive.
why so long???

Generally speaking DVD+RW and DVD-RAM are very close formats (except DVD-RAM has mandatory bad block management and DVD+RW has this as "feature" nobady I know implemented in hardware yet) and they both support recording from random address. Just like a hard disk. So you do not need to erease DVD+RW/-RAM when overwriting - just pass LBA 0 as starting LBA and everything would work fine.

Back to erase time - for DVD+RW/-RAM StarBurn does full format procedure, that's why it takes so long. Nero f.e. just overwrites file system header in "quick erase", we always drop to full format (at least in the first time for unrecorded media)... Question of a taste in general.

DVD-RAM are very easy to damage. I've spoiled a couple of disks with ejecting them during format so be careful! The only drives capable of writing to all of the -RAM media are Matshita/Panasonic (also the only one capable of working with media with cartridges). LG drives had also spoiled me some no-name DVD-RAMs from "Mr. DATA" brand and some Panasonic branded ones