I built my kernel which is 2.217 and selected SCSI support. I also selected SCSI emulation as there is no SCSI hardware. There is an ATAPI CDROM and the new Plextor CDRW drive will simply plug in to a remaining IDE slot on one of the controllers which are in the system. Because of that, I also selected SCSI CDROM support and the generic support. The only thing I didn't select was any hardware SCSI controllers, hard disk support or tape support. My /dev directory shows SG devices as in /dev/sg1, etc. When I boot, the dmesg output says the following regarding SCSI devices: scsi0 : SCSI host adapter emulation for IDE ATAPI devices scsi : 1 host. scsi : detected total. I am not sure if there should be something in the last line that says scsi : detected total. Then, I try something from root like cdrecord -scanbus I get cdrecord: No such file or directory. Cannot open SCSI driver. cdrecord: For possible targets try 'cdrecord -scanbus'. Make sure you are root. Cdrecord 1.8 (i686-pc-linux-gnu) Copyright (C) 1995-2000 Jörg Schilling Well, I was root when I did that and that was cdrecord -scanbus. If I try a lucky guess like cdda2wav -D/dev/sg1, I get the following error: cdda2wav: Bad file descriptor. Cannot open SCSI driver. open(/dev/sg1) in file interface.c, line 474 Use the script scan_scsi.linux to find out more. Probably you did not define your SCSI device. You can scan the SCSI bus(es) with 'cdrecord -scanbus'. Set the CDDA_DEVICE environment variable or use the -D option. You can also define the default device in the Makefile. The debug option for cdrecord told me that the device spec points to a null pointer which means that it is not set yet and explains why nothing else works. I could certainly set the device name if I knew one that works. By the way, I am using a 2.217 kernel because the 2.4x kernels seem to not respond to aumix settings. I think I'll mess with one problem at a time. I did compile a 2.410 kernel and had exactly the same SCSI weirdness. I think I maybe have missed a step or are misunderstanding instructions in the documentation. Right now, nothing quite adds up.