A CD-RW does need to be "mounted" as a rewritable drive before the rewritability is available. I've frankly had so little interest in them that I don't recall whether recent Windows versions have a built-in capability for mounting them, but the function should be available in most "burner" programs.

It is necessary that the drive also have RW capability, and not all CD burners do, although the capability is almost universal in recently manufactured ones.

For any recent hardware, there are standardized "logos" that should appear on the front of the tray (or immediately adjacent to the slot) that tell you what your device can do. If your drive has logos reembling the current ones, it's probably new enough that RW capability should be indicated by a logo if it's present; and if there isn't a logo that says REWRITABLE or RW somewhere in one of them, it's possible that you have a burner that lacks read/write/rewrite capability. Your program may tell it what to do, and the program may think that the instruction was received, but the burner won't obey.

A few burner logos are shown near the bottom of the page HERE just for reference.

John