Is the cable to the CD writer shared with any other device, such as a hard disk? That might cause problems - see the -immed option to cdrecord.
There are 4 ide devices ide1 has 2 hard drives and ide2 has cdrw and cdrom
Tried cdrecord --dev=/dev/hdd -immed blah.iso and still hangs exactly the same.
Try:
strace cdrecord --dev=/dev/hdd blah.iso
You might at least find out which system call is causing the hang.
Paul.
