LinuxQuestions.org - System freeze with CDRW

Hello to the Linux community.

I waded into Linux this fall for the 1st time and am sorry that I waited so long. The amount of learning has made it a struggle at 1st and now a real pleasure. I find Linux to be a great desktop replacement for Winblows.

I have tried to answer a couple of hardware questions that I could for others in this forum, now I would like to ask one please.

I have a Ricoh RW7083A 8X8X32 CDRW that mounts fine,
Shows up in the file directory as /mnt/cdrom2 (hdd)
but freezes the machine upon trying to read a cd. Anytime I try to access the drive with formatted media in it or with X-CD-Roast, system hangs. It will not freeze with blank unformatted media in it.

cdrom (hdc) is the cdrom, it works fine.

I have had it as a master on the secondary IDE channel, a slave, and the only drive on the secondary IDE jumpered as master.

I do get an error with it. When trying to access the drive with no media in it
mount: block device /dev/hdd is write-protected, mounting read only.
Root and users do have permission to view and modify content. I would expect to just get a no medium found error.

I ask this question to see what I am doing incorrectly. Other users have said this hardware to work with Linux. I am using Kernel 2.6.3-7. Mandrake 10.0

I have 2 HD's on the primary IDE, master and slave.

This is a Celeron 400 that I put together to learn Linux.
196 MB pc100
2- 3gig UDMA1 HD's
10/100 NIC
Sound Blaster compat. SC
cdrom
cdrw
Mandrake 10.0
Next will be trying to get 802.11b to work.

hda 1st hard drive part. 1 is / 5 is swap 6 is /home
hdb 2nd hard drive /disk2
hdc cdrom
hdd cdrw

fstab

/dev/hda1 / ext3 defaults 1 1
none /dev/pts devpts mode=620 0 0
/dev/hdb1 /disk2 ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/hda6 /home ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom auto unmask=0,user,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,ro,exec 0 0
/dev/hdd /mnt/cdrom2 auto unmask=0,user,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,ro,ecec 0 0
none /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/devfdo,fs=ext2:vfat,--,unmask=0,iocharset=iso8859-1,sync,codepage=850 0 0
none /mnt/hd supermount
dev=/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target1/lun0/part1,fs=ext2:vfat,--,unmask=0,iocharset=iso8859-1,kudzu,codepage=850 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda5 swap swap defaults 0 0

hdaprm -i /dev/hdd
Model=CDR/RW RW7083A, FwRev=1.20, SerialNo=
Config ={ Fixed Removeable DTR<=5Mbs DTR>10Mbs non magnetic}
Raw=0/0/0 Trksize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=0
BuffType=unknown BuffSize=0kB, MaxMultSect=0
IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:240, w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120, rec:120}
PIO modes: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
DMA modes: sdma0 sdma1 sdma2 mdma0 mdma1 *mdma2
AdvancedPM=no

The drive works fine with winblows.

What have I missed here? Maybe Linux does not care for this hardware but I thought that I would ask first.

Thanks for letting me be a part of this forum and the open source community.