> > yes i restarted then even tried a reboot > Alright! What does ls -l /dev/cdrom give you? What is the output of cdrecord -scanbus >From what I see something is claiming rights on your cdrom and doesn't let anybody else operate on it. This something can operate only through the driver that runs the device. So either that driver is mulfunctioning or something else is fixing itself on the cdrom. So a couple of things to do is to shut down X-Windows and on one of the terminals try to mount the cdrom and see what happens (that way you'll know for sure that it's not the 'automount' thing I hinted in previous post. Then browse around your /proc/ide/hdc/ directory that has all the info about the device and post your results. I can think of only three things: 'automout' feature, faulty module, bad SCSI, ATAPI module setup. Good luck!
