>:(Search, including many messages hereon, has not provided answer. Hope to do better here.

Simply trying to find path to a msn EXCEL file on my hard drive (C). Purpose being its need in order to remove READ ONLY from a CD. Trying to copy from C to CD but stopped by the Read Only.

Desired file is in Documents, as well as few other C drive locations.

Am on Vista Ultimate with IE7.

Will be grateful for your help. Thank you.Sorry but unless you have a CD-RW, you cannot remove anything from your CD. Once you burn it on the CD, it's there forever.
The only exception is with a CD-RW because it can be formatted and all data removed.

CD-R = CD Recordable
CD-RW = CD ReWritable This also means that once a CD-R is burned, you can't add more data to it, which is why your attempts are being thwarted.Carbon Dudeoxide & CBMatt are mostly correct. The reason you are getting the read only error is that the disk you are trying to burn to is read only. It does not matter whether the file being copied is read only or not. The formats used on most cd-r disks do not allow writing additional information to the disk.

But there are dozens of different formats for cd-r disks, some of them are CONSIDERED multisession CD-ROM's. In those formats it is possible to add to or update the disk with a newer version of a particular file. You can never delete or rewrite on those disks.(They are in fact read only) What you are doing is simply adding to the empty space, and writing a new TOC (Table of Contents). (It is not possible to change a read only cd format to multisession. If you want a multisession cd, you must start out that way.)

There is also a format that MAKES your CD act much like a portable drive, called Universal Disk Format (UDF). This format allows packet writing. If you want your CD-R to act like a portable drive, you can use this format.

There are a couple of downsides to the UFD format. The main one is this. You must first install software on your computer that supports UFD read & write. Then when you try to read this disk on another computer, you will find that it cannot be read without first installing the UFD read software. I am not sure, but I THINK that VISTA may have UFD read-write built in.

What it boils down to is this. CD-r's are read only in most cases. The other formats are available, but not in very COMMON use among the mainstream computer users.I fear alot more details are needed here even though it sounds simplistic...