Why can’t CD’s be recorded onto other CD’s?
Most of the CD’s you encounter are prerecorded. These CD’s were mass-produced from a master, using plastic molding techniques, followed by metal deposition and painting. Recordable CD’s, which are used now in CD-ROM applications, are written by an intense laser beam, which alters the reflectivity of the CD spot by spot to create a disk that behaves just like a prerecorded CD. However, once a CD has been “written”, it cannot be cleaned for rewriting. At present, recordable CD’s can only be written once. There are some new optical and magneto-optical techniques around that allow erasure, but I don’t think these techniques have appeared in CD’s yet.