I've been a casual linux user (grad student in the sciences) for years, but I've just recently made the switch at home, too.

Things were going fine until I encountered an error while trying to read from my CD-ROM drive:

I'm getting "Input/output error" -- it doesn't matter whether I'm logged in as root or not.

I've installed programs off this CD before and things worked fine -- but this is a new machine and a new install of redhat (though I'm using an older version). This is a CD-RW rather than a regular CD-ROM, also.

When I look at the cdrom, this is what I see:

[root@localhost]# ls -l /mnt/cdrom
total 72552
dr-xr-xr-x 2 root root 2048 Nov 22 2002 bin
dr-xr-xr-x 5 root root 2048 Nov 22 2002 iraf
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 74286597 Nov 22 2002 OOo_1.0.1_LinuxIntel_install.tar.gz
dr-xr-xr-x 3 root root 2048 Nov 22 2002 sm

I can cp the OOo_* file from the CD onto my HD just fine, but when I try to copy anything in the other directories onto my HD, I get the input/output error. If I try to list the contents of any file in the cdrom's directories, I can't see anything (but I don't get an error message, just a carriage return).

Here are the contents of my /etc/fstab, though I don't really know what this means:

[root@localhost]# more /etc/fstab
LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1
LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
/dev/hdb2 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0

Help?

Thanks!

I would hazard a guess that your problems are to do with having owner and kudzu in your fstab. Either that, or your drive is knackered, but I doubt that since you can copy OOo file over to the harddrive.

The man mount page says that...the owner option is similar to the user option, with the restriction that the user must be the owner of the special file. The kudzu option allows the device/mount-point to be removed when there is no disc present. If I were you, I'd try a different entry in your fstab and see how you get on. Something like:This will allow all users to mount and umount the drive, which is useful. You can add ro to the entry if you like, but I didn't bother since the files are set ro on the disc anyway.

Hope this helps.

That did work -- thank you!