Have you tried the knoppix nodam cheat code? Of course it could also be that the drive is so old and marginal that you just are going to have issues with it, or it might be something completely different about the hardware. If nodma does not help you might want to try swapping optical drives just as a temporary test, to help confirm that the drive works in the other system or to rule out the drive as the only problem in the system it is now failing in.