I have been chasing errors on the PATA hard disk and PATA DVD/CD writer on my Abit motherboard for months. Finally I started shopping around for a replacement computer. But after a few weeks, I noticed there had been no errors for three weeks, approximately since the last reboot. What was different? I think, I had unloaded the SATA driver. This motherboard has both PATA and SATA controllers, but nothing is plugged into the SATA controllers. I had to take down the machine to check some part numbers. On reboot, errors while burning a DVD from disk. Unload the Nvidia SATA drivers (nv_sata) and try again, no errors. Next day, burn the backups to DVD. No errors. I think I have enough points to draw a line. The errors are coming from interference between the PATA and SATA controllers and/or the PATA and SATA drivers. Anyone experienced anything like this? And what is the SuSE way to prevent the drivers from being loaded? Jeffrey