I made a lot of progress and what I found may help some people so here it is as briefly as I can make it. First, I will sound like a politician here and say that everybody was right to some extent on configuring SCSI emulation in the kernel. My big mistake was in compiling in SCSI disk support. This killed the CDROM SCSI emulation. When I took out the SCSI disk support, the SCSI channel appeared. I still had terrible problems with cdda2wav and cdparanoia and they both did the same thing. Both tried to work using /dev/scd0 as the scsi device, but the system groaned and sputtered and the audio was full of a wraspy sound which was basically a break in the sound about 75 times per second. This is the sector rate, but you shouldn't hear it. I ran cdparanoia for 20 or 30 minutes once and it didn't even rip one song completely. Since I now had SCSI emulation, I decided to install the Plextor CDRW drive. I guess the other drive is simply not capable of CDDA playback because the system now can download an entire CD in 7 minutes flawlessly with perfect audio just like it is supposed to. Both cdda2wav and cdparanoia now seem to work perfectly but I seem to still be snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. It was time to burn a CDRW disk with a file system so I put in a brand new CDRW which was included with the drive as a sample. I got mkisofs to produce a mountable image so the last step was to feed that to cdrecord. I used the following command. mkisofs -l -R -q /home/martin |cdrecord -dev=/dev/scd0:0,0 -dummy - I held my breath and got the following error which was the first error I had seen using the new drive: cdrecord: Cannot do inquiry for CD/DVD-Recorder. cdrecord: Success. test unit ready: scsi sendcmd: fatal error Cdrecord 1.8 (i686-pc-linux-gnu) Copyright (C) 1995-2000 Jörg Schilling scsidev: '/dev/scd0:0,0' devname: '/dev/scd0' scsibus: 0 target: 0 lun: 0 Using libscg version 'schily-0.1' CDB: 00 00 00 00 00 00 cmd finished after 0.000s timeout 40s The order of the output lines from cdrecord is a little different than they normally display, but I captured standard error and standard output and they don't arrive at the same time. If I use cdparanoia and test the drive, I get good output cdparanoia III release 9.7 (December 13, 1999) (C) 1999 Monty <monty@xiph.org> and Xiphophorus Checking /dev/sg0 for cdrom... Testing /dev/sg0 for cooked ioctl() interface /dev/sg0 is not a cooked ioctl CDROM. Testing /dev/sg0 for SCSI interface generic device: /dev/sg0 ioctl device: /dev/scd0 CDROM sensed: PLEXTOR CD-R PX-W1210A 1.08 Checking for SCSI emulation and transport revision... Drive is ATAPI (using SCSI host adaptor emulation) Checking for MMC style command set... Drive is MMC style 004: Unable to read table of contents header Unable to open disc. Is there an audio CD in the drive? That last part about the audio CD is due to there being the new CDRW which had not yet been recorded yet. If I put an audio CD in, it reads the table of contents just fine. Has anybody any ideas as to what this last nasty problem is? By the way, if you compile the SCSI emulation support in to the kernel, the append statements in lilo.conf don't seem to do anything. That probably is necessary to make the module load, but I tried it with and without and nothing changed. Thanks to Janina and all for your good suggestions. You have kept me beating my head on this brick wall until I have made a dent at least. I'm still not all the way through, yet. Martin McCormick