Modem or burner not supported?

On the COM2 issue, make sure that your motherboard is not also trying to supply you with a COM2 in the form of a serial port.

Good luck.

Maybe your modem card use the same resource of your built-in com2 port.

Regarding burner Linux support only SCSI drives, if you wish to word with IDE you must enable SCSI support for ide drives.

In Madreke 7.2 you does not have to recompile kernel, just use append hdc=ide-scsi hdd=ide-scsi in lilo.conf to see your ide devices as SCSI.

To answer your question about using CD-R[W]
drives under linux, yes, Linux does support
these quite well, and there are a variety of
programs for burning CDs.

For a very helpful and detailed discussion,
and step-by-step guide to setting up, using,
and finding the software to burn CDs, see the
CD-Writing HOWTO at LDP:
http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/CD-Writing-HOW

I don't know your modem, but generally speaking, if it is an internal modem, it is highly likely that isn't a "real" modem, but a windows-modem. Even if it pretends to be a COM port in windows, that might be some com-port emulating stuff.
Take a look at
http://www.idir.net/~gromitkc/winmodem.html
There is explanations about how and why, and also a list of which modems does not work, which can work with some tweaking and which should work directly.
(In other words, a "real" modem connects toa serial port, internal "real" modems is really a card with a com-port, then the modem after that).
AT&F :-)