Hi everyone:
I'm having some serious issues mounting my cdrom drive.

For some reason, whenever I try to mount, it detects and starts reading the CD,
but very soon crashes the entire system, whether I do mount -a, mount /mnt/cdrom, etc. I'm running Debian Sarge, if that's relevant.

Here's my fstab entry:

/dev/hdb /mnt/cdrom iso9660 ro,user,noauto 0 0

Any ideas?

Hi,

When you say the whole system is crashing, do you mean the computer becomes unusable and you have to reboot? If so, this is not happening from a mere misconfiguration. First off, have you tried with dirrerent CDs? Is the drive working - if Linux is the only OS have you got a CD you can try booting off - any bootable CD will do?

If the disk and the drive is fine you have a kernel problem. Try the following:

<insert CD>
file -Ls /dev/hdb
dmesg | tail -n 20

Any hints in there?

Are you using the standard 2.6.8-2 kernel or a 2.4-series one? If you can eliminate hardware issues, try an alternative kernel.

As you can probably tell I'm guessing now, but trying these tests should lead to an answer.

TIM