I have a CD writer/DVD player combo drive in my laptop. I have all the options configured into my kernel correctly to allow SCSI emulation. When I add 'hda=ide-scsi" to my Grub config, I am able to boot into Linux fine and I can see my drive with cdrecord --scanbus. This is great, but I'm not sure what to do next. I am not able to mount any CDs though--and I'm guessing this has something to do with my fstab not accommodating to the newly emulated CD drive. Furthermore, I am not able to get Grip to find my CD-ROM.

Here is a snippet of /etc/fstab:

/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,ro 0 0

Is your CD/DVD drive really hda?
hda - 1st controller master
hdb - 1st controller slave
hdc - 2nd controller master
hdd - 2nd controller slave
etc....

The CD/DVD drive should be /dev/scd0. Is /dev/cdrom a link to /dev/scd0?
What is the output of:
ls -l /dev/cdrom

Try mounting manually, login a root:
mount -t iso9660 /dev/scd0 /mnt/cdrom

I am quite positive that my CD-ROM is located at /dev/hda. In every distribution I've installed, my CD-ROM has been detected as /dev/hda.

Here is the output of ls -l /dev/cdrom:
lr-xr-xr-x 1 root root 13 Mar 5 13:03 /dev/cdrom -> cdroms/cdrom0

And here is the output of mount -t iso9660 /dev/scd0 /mnt/cdrom:
mount: special device /dev/scd0 does not exist

You use SATA hd's or something? Post the output of the 'mount' command (all by itself).

mount:
/dev/hdc3 on / type reiserfs (rw,noatime)
none on /dev type devfs (rw)
none on /proc type proc (rw)
none on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
none on /proc/bus/usb type usbfs (rw)

What's the output of 'cdrecord -scanbus'?
Try mounting this like it's a cdrom: /dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/cd

During boot, the module ide-cd is loaded, but not scsi-cd. After running modprobe scsi-cd, I am able to run cdrecord -scanbus. Here are the results:

Cdrecord-Clone 2.01a25 (i686-pc-linux-gnu) Copyright (C) 1995-2004 Jörg Schilling
Linux sg driver version: 3.1.25
Using libscg version 'schily-0.8'.
scsibus0:
0,0,0 0) 'HL-DT-ST' 'RW/DVD GCC-4240N' 'D110' Removable CD-ROM
0,1,0 1) *
0,2,0 2) *
0,3,0 3) *
0,4,0 4) *
0,5,0 5) *
0,6,0 6) *
0,7,0 7) *

And then this:

mount /dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/cd -t iso9660 /mnt/cdrom
mount: block device /dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/cd is write-protected, mounting read-only
mount: No medium found

What distro is this?

Oddly enough, I am able to mount the CD by running

mount /mnt/cdrom

Strange. Any ideas about this or getting Grip to see audio CDs?

And now Grip can see the CD, but upon trying to rip, I get the error:

Unable to open cdrom drive.

Gentoo

Update:

I can rip CDs using Grip, but only as root. This bothers me. I will continue too look for a solution, but if anyone knows how to fix this problem, let me know.

You need to give users read and write access to the cdrom device so that they can send the appropriate ripping commands to the cd and read the data back. It looks like you're using devfs, so you can just set the appropriate permissions in devfsd's configuration to make it save permissions over reboots.

Gentoo probably also has a cdrom group for users who have access to the cdrom. If they do, you can try adding the user to that group in /etc/group The user will have to logoff and log back in to get the new groups.