hey,

I am having trouble mounting a cdrom drive. I am running red hat 9 on a dell laptop and when I type the command (as root of course) I get the following message...

mount: block device /dev/cdrom is write-protected, mounting read only
mount: No medium found

But when I put in a cd and type all I get is total 0. I have never had problems mounting my cdrom drive before. Is this because I am trying to read from a cd I burned from windows. The disc contains the source code of strace as a .tar.bz2 so this should surely open right? But the thing is audio cds won't even open with the cd player program... I am truely lost with this. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Oh my /etc/fstab contains...

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/hda3 /swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom udf,iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0

and my /etc/mtab contains....

/dev/hda2 / ext3 rw 0 0
none /proc proc rw 0 0
usbdevfs /proc/bus/usb usbdevfs rw 0 0
/dev/hda1 /boot ext3 rw 0 0
none /dev/pts devpts rw,gid=5,mode=620 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs rw 0 0

you might notice that there is no mention of a cdrom drive in my /etc/mtab file. Can anyone see anything from any of this. It is driving me mad! Pease help!!!....

Gearóid

What do you have in the CD drive?

it never seems to matter. Whether I mount it with no cd in the drive or with a cd in the drive I still get the same mount: no media found message...

You need to have a CD in the drive and make sure it is a data CD and not a music CD.

but would the fact that I burned the cd in windows make a difference? Would it configure the cd in such a way that Linux couldn't read it?

It depends - what format did you burn it in? If you used the iso standard then there shouldn't be a problem.

oh, I dunno. I am having other problems too. It seems to hang forever at the boot screen even before grub loads (at the Press F2 to enter setup stage) and even when I try to eject a cd (either by pressing the button on the door or by typing eject -r) it takes all day. Would you recommend I just install slackware 9.1 and start over?? I know there is always a huge debate over this "what's the best distro" topic, but what do you think? I don't know enough about Linux to try and start trying to figure all of these problems out....

ok, last post about this I swear!!..... But just to say that I swapped the cdrom drive for a cdr drive and now it works. So it must just have been a hardware problem afterall...

But yes you do need a cd in the drive

when you burned your CD in Windows you did not close the session of the cd.
So your problem was solved by installing a CDR driver because CDR-Drives can read not closed cd's.

When you want to read a cd in a regular cdrom you must have closed the sessions of the cd.

I too have the /dev/cdrom but instead of that I have to mount /dev/sr0 to get my cd-rom work properly. Because my CD-ROM is registered as an scsi device, it must be mounted so...