VMWare / Readhat 6 CDROM issue

Hi,
I'm running Redhat 6 through VMWare on a Windows 7 machine. I'm new to Linux so am going through some CBTs. One of them talks you through mounting CDROM in the terminal - mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdrom.

This was sucessful, however, when I umount the cdrom (umount -t /dev/cdrom)I can only open and close the physical drive on the host machine when the virtual machine is running.

Any advice would be very welcome

to mount the cd/dvd on RHEL you don't have to specify the type
#mount /dev/sr0 /media
#umount /dev/sr0
eject
and if you have iso image on and media or on your local disk you can mount it
#mount -o loop xxx.iso /mnt

normally on the current RHEL 5 or RHEL6 there is no need to manually mount a cd or dvd or usb

they should be auto mounted at time of boot
that is unless you set it so that nothing is auto mounted

the folder /media is the auto set up folder for dvd's , cd's, and usb's
you might want to read the man pages for

man mount
man fstab
man udev

now you DO need to manually mount a 3.5 floppy after you manually tell the kernel to look for it

you might want to search the red hat knowledge base
( ps . your rhn username and password WILL be required - the one you set up with the required yearly support contract)
https://access.redhat.com/knowledge/search

or read the rhel documentation
https://access.redhat.com/knowledge/...erprise_Linux/

Wonder if when you unmount it the VM releases the drive back to the host? Might do that if you added in guest additions.