Trying to sort out CD-R/DVD behavior on Debian Thinkpad

[Mitchell Gil Maltenfort <mmalten@comcast.net>]

Trying to sort out behavior of a CD-R/DVD combo drive on my IBM Thinkpad (R32).

First, as of today the DMA flag stopped having the expected effect.  I tested it after it had a hard time reading a Debian disk (via Cheapbytes).  "hdparm -tT" showed no difference in buffered read speed (1.7 Mbytes/sec), even though it had been increased by a factor of 10 when I turned DMA on.

Oddly enough, there's been no performance degradation of playback of CD or DVD.

Any idea what could have caused this, and what my options for diagnostics are?  I'm running Woody testing.  I've tried running "hdparm -E" with various numbers after E, but anything above E0 _slows down_ the buffered reads (550 kB/sec)!.


The other thing I'm trying to sort out is how to do CD writing for backups.  I've inserted ide-scsi in my /etc/modules, and installed mondo (testing it now) and multicd.  If I run cdrecord dev=ATAPI -scanbus, it seems to recognize it, but warns I may have headaches.  Again, advice welcome...

Thanks in advance.

Mitch