my cd burner is a LITE-ON LTR-16102b cd burner, linux thinks it is a normal cd drive and I have no I dea how to install it any help would be great thanks.

first, what makes you think mandrake thinks that it is not a cd -burner? Have you tried burning a CD?

yah I was trying to run cdrecord and it keeps saying that it is a read-only drive

well, I googled a bit and your cd-writer is definitely linux compatible. What is the output of
cdrecord -scanbus

Does it give you the drive as one of the devices it sees?

yah it says it is the 3rd one and that is the only one that comes up.

what about the output of
cat /proc/dev/cdrom/info
this gives you info it has on the cd-drives. Do you have more than one by any chance?

well the output of cat /proc/dev/cdrom/info came up with No such file or directory and yes I have 2 cd drives, the first one is a CD-Rom and that one is known as hdc

sorry, I meant
cat /proc/sys/dev/cdrom/info

(the sys part was missing)

yah it shows both cd drives and it also says that it can write cds as well

that's strange. cdrecord shouldn't complain in that case. Try this. The device name of your cd-writer, scd0 or sr0 or whatever it is (it shows up at the top of the output of cat /proc/etcetc) is actually a link. You can where it is linked by
ls -l /dev/scd0 (or whatever the right device name is)
the link target will be something like
scsi/host0/bus0/target3/lun0/cd

the numbers behind bus,target and lun give you the way to identify the device for cdrecord. In the above case, I would pass the argument dev=0,3,0 to cdrecord. Maybe this'll work?

Thanks That worked I got it to burn yay .....

No prob. Glad it worked out