I am trying to use my DVD writer and it will only mount read only from the command line I do mount /dev/cdrom and it always says mounting read only, I try in K3B and it does not find the writer and I cannot specify it anywhere.
I am also having a problem with files in /mnt/cdrom that are not supposed to be there and I cannot delete them as user or root, no matter what I do. They are files that were on a disk but the disk is not in the cdrom anymore.

This is my fstab:

/dev/hda2 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/hda1 / reiserfs defaults 1 1
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom auto noauto,users,rw 0 0
/dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1 auto noauto,users,rw 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner 0 0
/dev/sda2 /mnt/camera auto noauto,users,rw 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0

Is there a way to make it write and read?

You need to use the DVD+/-RW tools for Linux -- you can't just mount the disk and write to it like a normal block device AFAIK. This howto that I found off of Google explains some about it.

A couple of questions, too:

(1) What make/model DVD burner do you have?
(2) You are using Slack 10.2. Assuming you are using the 2.4 kernel you will need to have ide-scsi emulation for your burner (2.4 kernels only burn to SCSI devices so you need to emulate your IDE burner as a SCSI burner except in the unlikely circumstance that you actually have a SCSI CD writer). Did you activate the ide-scsi stuff? If not you'll need to edit /etc/lilo.conf, add hdc=ide-scsi to the append line for your kernel, rerun lilo, and reboot. This assumes your burner is /dev/hdc (second IDE channel master device).
(3) You say you can see files off an old disk in /mnt/cdrom. This may indicate that the device was never correctly unmounted. What is the output of the mount command (with no arguments)?

I dont know the model but it did work with slack 10 using 2.4 kernel. I dont know about emulating as scsi. this is what mount shows

/dev/hda1 on / type reiserfs (rw)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
usbfs on /proc/bus/usb type usbfs (rw)

Hmmm ... maybe then you can try cdrecord -scanbus to see if it picks up the drive or show the outputwhen you try to have k3b detect the drive. Does the system log or message log show anything?

As for the files in /mnt/cdrom -- /mnt/cdrom is just a normal directory -- maybe they were copied in there by mistake? Just a thought.

I appended lilo and now when I do cdrecord -scanbus, the cdrom is found but cdrecord is really difficult to use from command line.
I will have to check the k3b logs.
I installed xcdroast and that gives an error saying I have to configure it as root but there is no way to do that.

Try running xcdroast as root and see if will help you out. If cdrecord can detect the burner, k3b should be able to as well.

I can't speak to why your burner is not detected by K3B, but there is no need to mount a disc to burn it. Before you actually burn something onto it, there is no filesystem on the disc to mount.

When burning CDs and DVDs, just put the disc in the drive and burn. Don't try to mount a disc with no filesystem.

good luck otherwise, I'm baffled.

When I run xcdroast as user I get a message saying you must run configuration as root to start using xcdroast, so i try as root and I get a console messages saying cannot open graphical server or something like that. Either way it does not work. K3B does not find any burner at all and it wont accept the drive manually. Is there any other program that works for burning DVDs in linux?