cdrom. contents show up as question marks

extrasolar · 01-01-2005, 03:46 PM

Sometimes when I insert a CD and list the contents it shows up as a load of question marks:

[jason@jnrlnx cdrom]$ ls
?????* ??????*
[jason@jnrlnx cdrom]$

or doesn't list anything at all.

I've tried unmounting and mounting the device with no luck. The only solution I've came up with is rebooting. Even this sometimes doesn't help. If I insert an audio CD and play it through xmms it works fine but still no content listing. Any ideas?

teckk · 01-01-2005, 09:28 PM

I don't believe that audio cd's will show anything to the ls command.
Audio cd's don't have a file system on them.

They won't list anything in a file management application like Konqueror or simple file manager.

An audio application will be able to read the tracts on it.

Or did you mean that a data cd shows nothing to ls. And an audio cd shows no tracts in xmms.

extrasolar · 01-02-2005, 08:43 AM

Sorry should have been a little clearer. I'm talking about data CD's. Sometime's they work fine and other times I just get a load of question marks and cannot access the CD using any programme. The audio CDs tracks are listed in xmms and work fine even when the data CD's don't. Hope that isn't too confusing. lol.

otoomet · 01-02-2005, 01:37 PM

Something similar happened with me when I removed a cd that was not unmounted. The listing showed up as question marks. Solution was unmount-eject-insert-mount AFAIR.

Look at mtab (simply command 'mount') to check how the cd is mounted.

Perhaps it helps.

Ott

extrasolar · 01-02-2005, 01:50 PM

I actually tried that just after my last post. lol. It cured the problem as I suppose it should do. However I don't normally need to manually mount and unmount it because my distro does it automatically.

I think I found (maybe) the solution. I was messing around with the mount and umount commands to see how they worked. I think that's how it messed up in the first place. Anyhow, I umounted the cdrom. ls'd it to make sure it was unmounted. Then rebooted. It seem's to be ok now. (hopefully)

Thanks for the help.