No, that has to do with where the cables are physically on the computer. hda is primary master and hdc is secondary master. The inspiron reports itself as hda for mtab becasue of how its reads the where the cables are attatched.

But to mount it you call it /dev/cdrom because it is a cdrom device.

The obvious thing finally occured to my that you may be trying to mount a udf cd filesystem while you have fstab set to the iso9660 default. 95% of the cd's out there are iso9660 but if you are trying to mount a different type of system you would get an error. BTW, an rw formatted with one of the windows packet writers that makes the drive a giant floppy just plain won't work in Linux as far as I know.

Here are a couple of differnt lines you can try in your fstab that will allow you to mount as either udf or iso9660

/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom subfs fs=cdfss,ro,iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=0 0 0

/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom subfs fs=cdfss,ro,procuid,nosuid,nodev,exec,iocharset=utf8 0 0

Try them one at a time with, of course, rebooting in between if it does'nt work.

hahaha, told you i was lame... i tryed another cd, dunno why i didnt think of that in the first place... and i guess it was the file system cuz it read the other cd fine... thanks for all your help i appricate it...! so if its a different type of file system i can use those commands above in my fstab to try to mount the cds too, do i just add them? or is there anything i need to delete or a specific place i should put it in my fstab file? thanks so much! :-)

/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto, owner,ro 00

You want to replace that line with one of the ones that I gave you. The section where it says iso9660 specifies the file system. If subfs it will try 9660 and udf. You can aslo try autofs there but its slower because it goes through more possiblities. The rest is just various options. man fstab, man mount. and man mtab will give you more info on all of that.