I put a cd in my cd drive yet linux never mounted the device. When I try to do it manually, it tells me that it can't mount the device because it is either already mounted or busy. Linux doesn't let me just open the cd drive; I have to unmount it first, but it doesn't let me do that either because it doesn't recognize that the device is mounted (how many times can I say the word mount in one paragraph?). I know I can just restart but I would rather not. Anyone know how to deal with this?
(Fedora Core 2)

Thanks,
Maat

My guess is that it may be mounting it somewhere you don't know about. Try running "mount" with no arguments to see what it shows.

redhat/fedora have a program for automounting, which sometimes crashed, and this may have happend to you. In FC2 it happend a couple of times with me.I cannot recall the name. You have to kill this program, if it's not responding. Does this happen a lot? If you post me the result of "ps -A" I may remember the name.
Also, you may eject a cd without the umount command with the eject command:
eject /dev/cdrom
or simply
eject cdrom
but if this is the case, this won't work either.

Well, with CDs of bad quality (scratched or badly written), but not being totally unreadable, it happens sometimes that mounting or unmounting takes a long time (even some minutes), before it succeeds or fails.

If this is the case and you do not want to wait, just open a root konsole, and type:

lsof /media/cdrom

to see what process keeps the device open.
Then kill that process:

kill <pid>

Then you should be able to unmount the device.

That happens all the time to me.
I do, mount /dev/cdrom /mnt
then
umount /dev/cdrom
Then hit the eject button or do eject from command line as stated above.
I get the already mounted message but when I umount, it goes away and I can mount again.

mount /dev/cdrom /mnt ??
why not:
mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom
or just
mount /dev/cdrom.
since the destination is in your fstab.
Aren't there other devices with mount destination under mnt?
Also, as far as i know you don't need a umount command if you want to use the eject command.
The umounting is done automatically.

I have to do it the way I posted, If I dont I cannot mount another filesystem on that drive untile I do umount. If I take the disk out, and try to put another one in, the drive is still mounted with the same filesystem that was on the previous disk.

Exactly the same often happens here on SuSE 9.1 + KDE + Konqueror.

I do what I already described and the problem disappeares for some time. Actually until I happen to insert an other CD that is a hard one - as this only happens when my CD drive has difficulties in reading a CD. Besides, I know my CD drive is not as fit as it should be.

By the way: is your CD drive OK?

Konqueror is the program that keeps the cd busy.You shoud exit any directory from tha CD(not closing Konqueror, just go to your home directory,and then type eject in a konsole,umount /mnt/cdrom).Sometimes there are some files that Konqueror does not know with what program to open them.On my fedora 1,if i doublecliked such a file,the cdrom would be busyy as long as konqueor was running(even in backaground,if u have a preloaded version of konqueror,see the settings).I had to kill konqueror.Now i have debian and have no problems

Well, actually konqueror may or may not be the culprit, depending on the situation.

Cause this also happened when I did not even open konqueror, just tried (but failed) to cp some file from the CD to hdd in konsole.

So, that is why I wrote before that one should see what keeps the drive busy (lsof /media/cdrom in my case), then kill that process, and unmount the cdrom.

I am having tsimilar problems as those described. Wanted to check what was keeping the cdrom from unmounting but I must have misinterpreted the command "lsof /media/cdrom". Is that LSOF (in bold letters for clarity)?. Does not appear as a function on my computer.
Running Mandrake 10.1 community with KDE 3,2

Thanks in advance

twallstr

Solved it. Just didn't have the program installed!
Sorry!