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Can I transfer a program like Print Shop that is on many CDs to a single DVD?

Answer: If you have a DVD burner, you can take the information from the CDs and put it all on a single DVD. A CD can hold up to 700MB of data, while a standard DVD holds 4.7GB and a double-layer DVD holds 8.5GB. This means you can put about 6.7 full CDs on a standard DVD and 12.1 full CDs on a double-layer DVD.

If the program you want to copy can be run without requiring a CD in the optical drive, you can just copy the data files from all the CDs to a folder on your hard drive. Once you have everything stored in a folder, you can use your operating system's built-in disc burning feature to burn the contents of the folder to a DVD.

If the program cannot be run directly from the hard drive (it requires a CD to run), you will need to burn a disc image of each CD onto the DVD. This copies the exact data structure from each CD, allowing each CD to be mounted when you insert the DVD. You will have to use a program like Toast to create the disc images and burn each one as a separate "session." Burning a session allows you to burn data onto a disc several times. When you insert a disc with multiple sessions, it will show up as several discs.

Most likely, the program you are trying to consolidate won't require you to have the discs inserted for it to run. So copying the data from all the CDs to a single folder and burning it to a DVD will probably work. Of course, if you have a lot of hard disk space, you could just leave the program data in a folder and not have to worry about having to insert a disk at all.

Published: May 8, 2005 — by Per Christensson

Answer from the PC Help Center
https://pc.net/helpcenter/transferring_multiple_cds_to_dvd
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