Hello. I have been burning CDs with my computer even back in the days of 2.2.14. Back then I was using my SCSI Yamaha 8484sz. I was using Slackware 7.1 back then and everything was cozy. I even ran SETI@home while ripping and burning and everything was great. Upon switching to 2.4.x, however, problems arose. At about the same time, I also got a Plextor 12/10/32S. From there, hell broke loose. Running SETI@home would thrash the hard drive enough for me to hit RESET and upon kernel bootup, the filesystem would be corrupted. This has happened to me around 5 times. At about 2.4.6 (2.4.4 didn't have this problem) ripping or burning a CD would _thrash_ the hard drive (whose throughput via hdparm is around 11MB/s), but SETI@home would no longer be a problem. The FIFO as shown by cdrecord would eventually fall to 1%. This problem was fixed around 2.4.7. Another less common problem was the fact that cdrecord would freeze my computer, but since it would thrash the hard drive anyway, I stopped burning CD's in Linux. Since the problem was fixed around 2.4.7, I started again. Then the freezing problems began _very_ apparent. I currently have around a dozen ruined CDR's because of this. It even froze once blanking a CDRW. The situation improved, but was not fixed, and now I'm using 2.4.14. It still locks the computer completely. I don't know what to do. Everything is fine in Windows 95 (and always was). I think it's the shoddy 2.4 Linux VM. Most would agree that 2.2.19 is way more stable, and I think I fall into that camp. Should I try it out? This is a 4.5 year old machine: should I test my RAM? Should I remove one of my SCSI CDRWs and then find out if the problem exists? -- Karol Pietrzak PGP KeyID: 3A1446A0