If you are on Solaris or NeXT-Step/Apple Rhapsody, you must disable volume management before creating a CD. This is needed because newer drives identify themselves correctly as CD-ROM drives. Unfortunately, the volume management daemon from Sun/Apple does not grok, that there may be a recordable medium in the drive. You do this on Solaris permanently by editing /etc/vold.conf NeXT-Step/Apple Rhapsody will only work correctly if you reboot while the CD-R drive is powered off. On Solaris you need to stop the volume management if you like to use the USCSI fallback SCSI transport code. Even things like cdrecord -scanbus will not work if the volume management is running.