CD Burning problems

[Mike Hicks <hick0088@tc.umn.edu>]

I have unfortunately had a very bad time trying to burn CDs in Linux.  I
started off with an Adaptec 2930 Ultra SCSI controller (narrow, not
wide) and a refurbished 2x Smart and Friendly Burner.  I could get data
CDs to burn and would be able to read at least most of the files (I
guess I never did thorough testing on that side of things), but I
couldn't get audio CDs to write _at all_.  The best burn I had for an
audio cd from that drive gave me about 5 seconds of audio, and another 5
seconds of the player skipping around trying to find the track again..

Next, I got a new Yamaha 6x Read/4x Write drive (/proc/scsi/scsi reports
the drive as a CRW6416S), since I figured the refurbished drive had just
been a bad idea in the first place.  Unfortunately, I still can't get
reliable burns.  I've written the RedHat 6.1 iso, and would go through
to verify the burn by running 'rpm --checksig --nogpg --nopgp *.rpm'
which usually comes back with 40 files that didn't get a good MD5
checksum..

Now, I'm trying to figure out the problem.  I've tried two 'brands' of
media -- Sony and Imation (but they may actually be from the same
manufacturer).  They were both blue or blue-green in color.  Should I
try another media type?  Is it possible I have a bad SCSI controller? 
Also, (this is just a random thought) could the kernel Tagged Command
Queue option for SCSI systems have anything to do with this problem?

Thanks for any advice you guys have..

-- 
 _  _  _  _ _  ___    _ _  _  ___ _ _  __   If in doubt, make it 
/ \/ \(_)| ' // ._\  / - \(_)/ ./| ' /(__   sound convincing. 
\_||_/|_||_|_\\___/  \_-_/|_|\__\|_|_\ __)                             
 [ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088/ | mailto:hick0088@umn.edu ]