[Paranoia] garbled/silent rips...

[eelboy at cox.net]

hi all, i'm new to the list so apologies for any poor etiquette on my part.

i have a dell optiplex745 running a standard debian sarge installation.  the slimline CD is detected as: TSSTcorpCD-ROM TS-L162C, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive - it's SATA, and for compatibility reasons I have sata running in PATA mode.

Ripping CD's produces either silent WAV's (with parnaoia) or choppy files (paranoia disabled).  Does anyone know if the problem would likely be the drivers being used for this drive? or trying to rip in PATA mode from a SATA drive?

During the rip, I see all '++++++' in the progress bar (literally all) , along with this guy ":-P" so I don't think that's a good thing :)

any suggestions? hoping....
thanks!
edward