Always remember, that you can still use corrupt CD-ROMs as coasters. :-)
Please check first if the writer works under other operating systems. Concretely:
If "it doesn't work" even under other operating systems you have a hardware conflict or defective hardware.
If it works under the other operating system and you use loadlin to boot Linux, then that is your problem. Loadlin makes a warm-boot with most of the hardware already initialized and that confuses the Linux-kernel.
Under Linux, some versions of the C-library are incompatible (buggy), so that an application linked against one version will not work with another. An example for an error triggered by pre-compiled binaries is the following:
[root@Blue /dev]# cdrecord -eject dev=2,0
cdrecord: No such file or directory. No read access for 'dev=2,0'.
Try to use Linux. Installation and configuration of SCSI-drivers for DOS is the hell. Linux is too complicated? Ha!
Most likely those errors are caused by
Under various circumstances SCSI devices dis- and reconnect themselves (electronically) from the SCSI bus. If this feature is not available (check controller and kernel parameters) some writers run into trouble during burning or fixating the CD-R.
Especially the NCR 53c7,8xx SCSI driver has the feature disabled by default, so you might want to check it first:
NCR53c7,8xx SCSI support [N/y/m/?] y
always negotiate synchronous transfers [N/y/?] (NEW) n
allow FAST-SCSI [10MHz] [N/y/?] (NEW) y
allow DISCONNECT [N/y/?] (NEW) y