[Nottingham] CD burning woes

[Godfrey Nix]

Hi,

I have been happily using a Compaq laptop (Evo N1015v) for a couple of
years now and am stuck - please any anyone help?

When I bought the laptop, I immediately wiped disk and installed Fedora
core 1 (from some CDs burned on my old server (sadly no longer here).
The other night I downloaded the 4 binary iso images and ran the
checksum against them - all ok. Burned each one using laptop seemed ok
so I rebooted machine and installed disk 1 and selected 'test media'
Each disk failed!
So I set up a desktop machine (RH 8 - yeah I know) with the same samsung
cd writer as used to burn original Fedora core 1 disks, FTP'd the images
from laptop and burned onto other CDs - this time using verbatim instead
of imation. Rebooted desktop machine and did test media with same result
on each disk - failure!

Now, I have successfully written a backup CD on the laptop (but that was
only 253Mb and not 600+).

Questions -
are old (ie over 9 months since buying them) CDs no use any more?
is the test media on Fedora core 4 broken and the images are really ok?
am I trying to copy more onto the CD than its actual capacity?

Suggestions as to where to go from here will be appreciated, and yes I
want to stick with fedora.

Greetings,

Godfrey