John, hdparm is really meant for devices that are driven by ide and legacy ata drivers. If your cdrom shows up as /dev/scd0, then it's going through a subsystem of the Linux kernel that's responsible for SCSI. More specifically you're driving your cdrom with "libata" SCSI layer that makes IDE/ATA devices look like SCSI ones. Even though the device accepts ATA commands, hdparm doesn't know how to talk to it because the kernel didn't git it a device that looks like an ATA device. You probably want to look at the sdparm and sg3-utils packages. Have a look at this to learn more about sdparm: http://sg.danny.cz/sg/sdparm.html When I last had to use it, I found sdparm a lot harder to figure out than the hdparm counter part. I don't have an ATA CDROM anywhere so I was unable to actually generate the command you need to flip DMA on. Should you end up using sdparm to get this going, I'd like to learn from your success. -Bart -- WebSig: http://www.jukie.net/~bart/sig/