TDK branded media, 8x, bang, first burn, no problems, verified the data cleanly, booted without hiccup. Fantastic, I could barely contain the excitement, I had to have a beer to calm down. It was worth it, three days of fighting later, I have a booting Linux CD!

Thanks for all your help guys, for anyone else out there having trouble with dubious media, try a branded disk. I'm assuming that because the file system is compressed, it's fussier about the burn quality, hence the low speed.

Now I'm off to try and resolve my problems with the DVD download...


Callum.