cdrom doesn't work at all anymore

[pchw]

first I could only play audio cd as root, and not as user. I tried several things, and the last thing I tried (at someone's suggestion) was chown $user /dev/sdb. After that, I couldn't play audio cd even as root anymore. On top of that, I lost the CD icon on my desktop (as user and root), and my machine won't recognize data CDs as user and root anymore. I don't know how to put it back and how to get CD to work. Help?

[fingal]

I'm not familiar with using chown in that way (though it might be okay?). I would try this.

I'll assume your user name is ted ... okay:
su
yourpassword
chown ted : ted /dev/sdb

If you have a lot of subdirectories, using chown to change things recursively is good. If I remember correctly (I'm not using a Linux box right now) this would be:

chown -R ted : ted /dev/sdb

Try that, and if it fails I'm very sorry

[pchw]

Is there any way I can bring back the existence of the CD itself? Root doesn't even recognize it. It's like it disappeared. My CD is also designated as hdc, not sdb, so I am a little concerned about that designation. Isn't that a designation of a scsi device? If I can at least bring back the CD that would be great. I am windows based, so I don't know how to make the transistion just yet. The hardware configuration sees the CD rom, but that is about it. Nothing else recognizes it, and now I can't even read data CDs. Any suggestions?