I'm trying to mount a cdrom with

mount -t iso9660 -r /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom

but it says

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/cdrom,
missing codepage or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so

dmesg | tail:

Buffer I/O error on device sr0, logical block 1
Buffer I/O error on device sr0, logical block 2
Buffer I/O error on device sr0, logical block 3
Buffer I/O error on device sr0, logical block 4
Buffer I/O error on device sr0, logical block 5
end_request: I/O error, dev sr0, sector 0
end_request: I/O error, dev sr0, sector 64
isofs_fill_super: bread failed, dev=sr0, iso_blknum=16, block=16
end_request: I/O error, dev sr0, sector 64
isofs_fill_super: bread failed, dev=sr0, iso_blknum=16, block=16

Try using "auto" for the filesystem, for example. Though the errors sound like it's something else than filesystem. Did you try it as root or as a regular user? Also you don't need to specify -r necessarily, I think it either mounts it read-only by default or because it's a cd-rom device, it does it anyway.

What kind of drive is it?

Looks like a bad disk or drive to me.

You can try to recover the data on the disc with dd_rescue.