Optical drives "disappear", browsing /mnt graphically causes system hang
 

this was posted in the debian-specific distro forum; i thought i may get a better, quicker response here.

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Its pretty simple: i was using the dvd burner to watch a movie, and copying some cds to disk and for no reason the cdrom stopped working with this error:

Unable to run the command specified. The file or folder file:/mnt/cdrom1 does not exist

this is using Knoppix 3.4 installed. I rebooted for the hell of it, and then *neither* of my optical drives could be accessed; even though theyre both in /etc/fstab and it hasnt been touched. What causes this, how can i get them back and keep it from happening again?

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Whenver I broswe /mnt graphically it hangs for 1-3 minutes before it displays the contents (using a terminal and doing ls has no problems however) the first time after a reboot or some such, but subsequent times it opens immediately; what causes this initial "lag" and can it be changed?

Thanks in advance