Hi Kerry and all. I appreciate that you are trying to help. but let me repeat again: this system was working just fine; I was listening to cds and burning cds and doing all the things one does with a cdrom and cdr. when this problem mysteriously occured, no changes had been made to the kernel and nobody had been opening the computer and plugging and unplugging cables. the necessary support is compiled into the kernel and I have been using it successfully for quite some time when this suddenly happened. This is not the case of trying to get a system up and running; this is a case that was working just fine and suddenly this happened. Cheryl
