Ever got I/O errors on CDs burned with cdrecord under Linux, although you were 100% sure the ISO image and the CD medium was OK?

I had that experience yesterday, while on-site at a customer. The I/O errors always occurred at the end of the burned CD, when I ran md5sum /dev/cdrom.

Today, I found this in the cdrecord manual:

-raw96r: This is the preferred raw writing mode as it gives best control over the CD writing process. [...] There are several CD writers with bad firmware that result in broken disks when writing in TAO or SAO mode.

I guess the Samsung CDRW/DVD SN-324S, revision U303, which came with my Dell Latitude D800, is one of them. Running cdrecord with the -raw96r option results in perfectly readable CDs with correct MD5 digests.

Interestingly enough, we had the same problem on the customer's IBM notebook running Nero under MS Windows.