All of the sudden, on both external CD burners I have, I'm getting "the connection is not stable" -- even though I've checked the connections.

and just got one have not seen too often:
drive reported and error, illegal request, sense code =0x21, 0x01, Buffer underrun.

In short, I'm getting a lot a mayhem all of the sudden from Toast, and the rest of my computer is working fine -- and it's with not one but two burners. any ideas appreciated. thanks.

Since these are external drives this could be an OS problem related to doing an incremental system update (such as from 10.3.8 to 10.3.9, for example). There are frequent reports of odd Firewire and USB problems that occur with these incremental updates. The fix is to download Apple's combined system update for your version of the OS and apply that on top of your existing system. In other words, apply the 10.3.9 combined system update on top of your existing 10.3.9 (if that's what you have).

Another thing to try is to shut down your Mac and leave it off for at least 10 minutes. The restart to see if that corrects the problem.

Was a bad FW hub! First time ever had a hub truly go bad, and it's a real killer to isolate problem to that --- it help that the hardrives wouldn't mount.