EDIT:

resolved the dvd problem so i changed the topic to deal with my music cd mounting problem...

please scroll down to see my problem.

heh. i was dead sure i could mount the audio cds. hmm.
anyway. i fixed it by su'ing to root and running xmms. plays well. heh.

If i understood well, it doesn't work in XP either? Both Mandrake and Slack couldn't use it? I'd say it could be a hardware problem. Maybe try to put it on the IDE channel where the cdrw is, just to see if that changes anything. If it doesn' t its most likely hardware. My cdroms stop working every once and a while for apparently no reason. Then i have to buy a new one. They just die, maybe its the same with your DVD...
-NSKL

nope it doesn't work with any os right now. but the weird thing is that it did like a week ago but it just stopped. dead. gone. SEE YA!

anyway. yeah i was thinking about that too. maybe i'll have some luck with that. how can a drive just "die" like that? ...weird..

That's just part of life, one day it works, the next day it fails. Usually anything with moving parts is likely to die first to something that doesn't have moving parts. And out of all hardware, usually the first thing to go is or are cdrom/dvd drives, floppy drives and hard drives, cause they all have moving parts in them....

do u have a disk in the drive, and is it a blank one?

i tired switching the cables for dvd and cdrw but the results were the same. i got angry so i blew in to the dvd drive and it kinda works now. lol. takes a long time to read it and stuff. i guess i'll need one of those compressed air thing to clean it.

i have another problem. it doesn't matter which drive i put my music cd in; it doesn't mount. it used to mount before so i could choose which track i want to add to playlist on xmms. but it just says

mount -t iso9660 /dev/hdc /mnt/dvd
mount: block device /dev/hdc is write-protected, mounting read-only
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdc, or too many mounted file systems

if i just do a mount /dev/hdc /mnt/dvd:

mount /dev/hdc /mnt/dvd
/dev/hdc: Input/output error
mount: block device /dev/hdc is write-protected, mounting read-only
/dev/hdc: Input/output error
mount: you must specify the filesystem type

remember, i switched my cables so dvd is /dev/hdd and cdrw is /dev/hdc. but it says /mnt/dvd cause i'm just lazy to change the dir.

what's going on?

You can't mount media cd's or dvd's. You simply put them in and launch the program to play the files off of them, etc.

Also in the future, don't change your first post, if anyone reading this is browsing for similiar type problems, your first post is what describes the problem, etc so they know what this thread is about. Also now the other replies do not make sense at all now.....