I managed to get debian to a state where cdrecord recognizes my cd burner. I have a goldstaar atapi cd burner and had tried using modconf to install sg and ide--scsi and had hdd=ide-scsi as part of the lilo append line. That didn't work at all even after having made the devices for the drives. So I removed all the scsi stuff from the kernel and ran lilo and rebooted the computer. Then I edited /etc/modules and put those modules in that file. On next reboot drives were recognized and cdrecord -scanbus now shows the cd burner along with the zip disk. Why doing it this way even worked at all I don't know. Now it's time to go and sort out alsa.
