By booting with the CD image from an older Redhat and performing a mediacheck I noticed the following:
-Two CD/RWs containing the image of CD1 failed at the same place (at 67% of completion), I succeded with a CD/R but the mediacheck became very slow at, you guessed it, 67% of completion). That CD/R still refused to boot from the 52x IDE CD reader, but it accepted to boot from the SCSI CD writer (24x for reading). The above suggests that something goes wrong around 67% ie two thirds of the CD.
-I also notice that xcdroast does not behave at all as used when burning a CD: it used to fill its buffer and FIFO and keep them close to 100%. For the speed, it started relatively slow and went accelerating. But now the FIFO and buffer are constantly shifting between 100% and 0%, the machine becomes also completely unresponsive: echo to keypresses suffers from a notable delay.
The distribution were the recording was done is Redhat 9, xcdroast is 0.98a13-4 built in Jan2003 so it hasn't changed, cdrecord is 2.0 release 11.9.1 and it hasn't moved either. kernel is 2.4.20-30.9 and this one has changed in Feb2004. The box has an NVIDIA chipset and is using the nforce driver from NVIDIA along with the nvidia kernel module needed by the nvidia X driver.
Are the other people who have had boot problems in the same situation (ie using kernel 2.4.20-30.9 and/or using NVIDIA drivers?