i think this might be a kernel issue, but: i burn a knoppix iso, try to install it on my old dell inspiron 7000, no go (drive light stays on, XP boots, and, yes, it does boot from cd-rom, tried it with a windows 95 boot disk). the machine has XP, and when i try to mount the cd, i get an i/o error (burn completes with no errors). oddly, booting the same disk on my dimension 2400 works fine (which is also the same machine i burned the cd from). trying with other another piece of older hardware, i get media errors. i've tried k3b, xcdroast, and command line cdrecord, no dice. the same machine that's burning used to run fedora core 3, and would work fine, up until the latest FC3 updates (which is why i think it's a kernel/cdrecord problem).
kernel version missing, cdrtools version missing... sorry, we can't guess.
(In reply to comment #1) > kernel version missing, cdrtools version missing... sorry, we can't guess. > sorry, forgot. kernel versions were multiple: kernel-2.6.14-gentoo-r4 kernel-2.6.14-gentoo-r5 kernel-2.6.15-gentoo-r1 have used cdrtools stable and unstable (2.01-r3 & 2.01.01_alpha01-r2)
I don't see this is a problem with Gentoo or cdrecord. If the same CD boots on another machine, then the CD is fine.