I never had problems accessing my harddrive or cdrom before...
Check dmesg, make sure it's detected (it should).
Now, put it a CD, and try to remember if it's supposed to be hdc, hdd, or sdc (on some occasions)...
then mount it:
mount /dev/cdrom (or hdc or sdc, or whatever... depending on your system) /mnt/cdrom.
I don't know if it's a good pratice, but when I get on a new system, I put in a cdrom, and enter the following commands:
cat /dev/hdc
cat /dev/hdd
cat /dev/sdc
...
until I get the output of the CD
... It's a stupid and lazy way of doing it, but I like it.