I was trying to record a CD with cdrecord on a Linux machine using an IDE CD-RW drive. Everything seemed fine after installing the necessary drivers, but the burn process always failed; at one point, a simulated burn actually caused the computer to hang.

The problem: it appears necessary to disable DMA access to the drive that has been mapped as a SCSI drive for CD-R operations. It's easy enough to do: as root, do a hdparm -c1 -d0 /dev/hdd. (Or /dev/hdc, or wherever your drive might reside.)