CD-RW and/or K3b problems

I installed a new CD-RW drive on my desktop running SuSE 8.1 Professional Linux.  Right now, I have two drives in the system.  A regular old CD-ROM and this CD-RW drive.  My CD-ROM (/dev/hdd) can read CDs just fine (audio or data).

I have tried to do writes to my CD-RW (/dev/hdc) to no avail.

I'm pretty sure that those are in fact the right /dev files because if I do

"eject /dev/hdc"  or "eject /dev/hdd" the drive I would expect to eject does.

When trying to burn mp3's in k3b, sometimes (ie. rarely) the burn seems to go okay.  By this I mean that all the tracks are written and seem to be the right length.

However, they're nothing but static.  Also, the very end of the songs--probably the last half second or so--seems to sound right. 

I get the message "not all files have been buffered".

I ran k3b_setup and it recognized my CD-RW as the drive to write to.

I've also noticed that the programs tccat, tcdecode, tcextract, tcscan, tcprobe, and transcode all seem to be missing.

One last thought...I'm not 100% sure that my CD-RW is installed properly.  Any tests I can run to see if it is?