Mount Rainier (packet Writing)

Mount Rainier (packet Writing)

Mount Rainier (MRW) is a format for writable optical discs which provides the packet writing and defect management. Its goal is the replacement of the floppy disk. It is named after Mount Rainier, a volcano near Seattle, Washington, USA.

Mount Rainier can be used only with drives that explicitly support it (a part of SCSI/MMC and can work over ATAPI), but works with standard CD-R, CD-RW, DVD+/-R and DVD+/-RW media.

The physical format of MRW disks is a layer placed in between the file system (e.g. UDF or FAT32) imposed by the operating system or the packet writing software used to write or read the disk and the physical layer which determines how data is written to or extracted from the optical disc. This is transparently managed internally by drive's firmware which remaps physical drive blocks into a virtual and defect-free space. Therefore the host computer does not see the physical format of the disk, only a sequence of data blocks capable of holding any filesystem.