Just to sum all up: as we have seen the drive did not loose the streaming; it was cdparanoia which got out of sync. So, only thing which fails is the cdparanoia. But who said the problem was caused by the hardware problems? Honestly I don't *know* if I have hardware problems or not. I just noticed mails with subject "The trouble with disks" in linux-audio-user. His problems sounds like the problems I have, and he too has an MSI board. It could mean that MSI boards are simply bad or that Linux requires special bios settings. If anyone else has MSI board and believes it is perfectly ok, please mail me and we will verify it by doing some tests (as believing is not enough!). Question: should the system clock go faster when CD-ROM device is used? It goes faster here and thus my /etc/crontab has lines for reading the hardware clock every ten minutes: 01 * * * * root hwclock -s --noadjfile --localtime 11 * * * * root hwclock -s --noadjfile --localtime etc. IRQ problems? Wrong settings in bios? Wrong settings in board switches? Of course, it is always easier to blame the mysterious hardware problems as one can then forget the possible real problems. Regards, Juhana