To burn a CDROM I have to turn off auto-mounting of CDROMs in the gnome control panel. Otherwise, gmc (or whatever) tries to mount the CD before the fixation phase is complete, which in turn messes up the newly created CD. I have this problem with a vanilla RH61 with no patches applied, an ncr53c8xx SCSI card and a Philips CDD 2600 CDROM writer. Also, I don't really know whether this is a problem with GNOME, cdrecord or something else, but I hope you do :-).
It's a problem with magicdev. You can remove it from your gnome session if you like.
This is a kernel bug or misfeature. The kernel should not be reporting the status of the device as CDS_DATA_* in response to the CDROM_DRIVE_STATUS ioctl until the burn is finished. I do not know enough about the process of writing a CD to say what this would require in detail. It may require cooperation with the writer software to fix this completely. (magicdev is off by default now in the gnome-core we ship, but this problem should be resolved at the source, and is not particularly specific to magicdev. It could be closed if it does not concern the kernel folks.)
This happened with cdrecord release 1.8a35 if that helps. But since my cd writer is currently broken, I'm afraid I can't do any more testing :-(. Cheers //Johan
Magicdev needs rewriting by someone who actually read the ATAPI specifications