I'm trying to make it so programs under a regular user account can access my cdrom. I used the chmod command and it works but only for that session. When the computer is rebooted it goes back to the previous setting. I thought chmod would make it permanent but its not.

I change to root and use this command: chmod 644 /dev/hdc

Am I doing chmod to the wrong thing or what?

Set it up so your users or groups have access via the /etc/fstab file when it is mounted.

if you are using a udev system you will have to edit the
for me that would be a file in /etc/udev/permissions.d
and the operative line is
hd*:root:disk:0660

that of course gives everyone read write

the kernel developers however made it in certain versions of the kernel only root can burn cd's
go figure... i think because it involves formatting and i guess it's true i don't want users to be able to format my hard drive

no way around that one

I added the users option to the fstab file and made my regular account a part of that group but I still have to use the chmod command so a program like Sound Juicer can read the disc to look up CDDB info. I can open a CD up in the file browser fine and see the contents but Sound Juicer won't work right.

This is my fstab file contents:

# This file is edited by fstab-sync - see 'man fstab-sync' for details
/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 / ext3 defaults 1 1
LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /sys sysfs defaults 0 0
/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/hdb3 /mnt/windows vfat auto,umask=0 0 0
/dev/hdc /media/cdrecorder auto noauto,users,owner,rw 0 0

As to the suggestion about the permissions I'm not sure what I would need to do. I opened the file under that dir and the line says hd*:root:disk:0660 already.

660 doesn't give everyone read-write, unless everybody is a member of the correct group.

Make it 666 for global read & write

I feel like I'm going backwards with this thing. A icon doesn't even appear on the dsktop anymore for me. I can see the disc under the file browser /media/cdrecorder. The options of mount media is checked under preferences but thats not working now. About to give up on making this thing work properly.

Is there something flakey since this thing is a DVD/CDRW combo drive or something?