I followed the suggestions below from michael.wardle@xxxxxxxxxx and resolved a similar problem on my RH8 system. Seems to work quite well now.
Maybe this would help.
R.Parr, RHCE Temporal Arts
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A few weeks back, I purchased a new Lite-On 52x52x24 EIDE/ATAPI CD-RW drive, which supports a buffer underrun technology Lite-On calls BURNproof (or something similar).
When I first tried to write a CD image using cdrecord, I was highly disappointed that I was only able to successfully write CDs at about 24 speed (any higher any cdrecord would generate error messages, and the CD would be corrupt), regardless of whether BURNproof was enabled or disabled.
My CD-RW drive is the secondary slave on the IDE bus, making it /dev/hdd by default. I also have a DVD-ROM drive as master on the same channel, making it /dev/hdc.
I decided to experiment a little to see whether I could improve the CD writing speed.
After configuring the CD-ROM drive (hdc) to also use IDE-SCSI emulation (as the CD-RW must), I was able to successfully write CD images at 48 speed (the highest speed supported by my CD-Rs) with no BURNproof idle periods (the light goes yellow when it's buffering and not writing as it did often when the CD-ROM was using IDE, but it now stays constantly red).
I have filed bug 86453[1] to request that Red Hat configure all IDE CD drives as ide-scsi. If anybody has comments on this issue, especially if you have also noticed improved performance after configuring all IDE/ATAPI CD drives to use ide-scsi, perhaps you could add to this bug.
To configure your other IDE/ATAPI CD drives as ide-scsi, just add
<device name>=ide-scsi in the kernel parameters in your bootloader
configuration file. My /etc/grub.conf contains something like:
kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.20-2.48 ro root=LABEL=/ hdc=ide-scsi hdd=ide-scsi
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^You may also need to manually modify the permissions on the new SCSI devices to be able to use them fully with programs such as Grip (see bug 86452[2]).
LINKS 1. Red Hat Bugzilla Bug 86453 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=86453 2. Red Hat Bugzilla Bug 86452 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=86452
