Ok, I see what you mean. But those are still just symlinks to the actual devices added for general convenience. You obviously also have /dev/hdb and /dev/scd0 in there, and those are the main device nodes. You should be able to use those directly instead. If you want to alter what symlinks are generated, you'll have to look into editing the
udev rules for the devices.
And since you have an fstab entry for hdb, then you can use mount to call it without any options other than the path (that's what fstab does; it provides a fixed list of mount options so that you don't have to type the full command each time). The "auto" option will generally not work because it's removable media (it really should have the "noauto" option instead, because "auto" just means it will try to mount the drive at boot), but you should be able to simply call "mount /dev/hdb" or "mount /media/cdrom". scd0, on the other hand, will need the full mount command each time you manually mount it because it doesn't have an fstab entry. If you want it to work the same way, then you'll have to add one.
Now as I said before, fstab only directly affects the mount command. It otherwise has little to do with your distro's automount system, which probably uses some combination of pmount or dbus calls or something. Each distro and desktop environment does it a bit differently. But many automount systems will start by checking fstab, and if it finds an entry will run the mount command found there. If it doesn't find an entry, then it will use whatever internal processses it has set up for mounting the device. So if it's automounting you're having trouble with, and it seems to be the case, then you'll have to look at fixing those settings instead.
