CD Drive is read only

[askinne2]

Hey guys. My cd drive is read only right now and I am running ubuntu 9.04. I had to run fsck manually on start up to fix some errors that were apparently there. It appears as if that ran smooth, but the cd drive is still mounted in read only mode. I cant play anything that I insert into the cd drive. And for that matter, no files appear at all when something is inserted into the cd drive.

I am definitely a beginner at linux and ubuntu so please give me detailed help. I really appreciate the help! I am in desperate need to run some cd's and currently cant do that. Thanks!

[DaGoomba]

I can assure you that the problem is not with the permissions on the drive itself. It's most likely because something got mixed up in your filesystem table. Can you post the contents of:

/etc/fstab

[askinne2]

Thanks for the reply. Sorry, but is there a command I can run to show you those contents?

Edit: Well I am not sure if this is all I needed to do but I ran fdisk -l and this is the output...

Disk /dev/sda: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x7910bf42

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 29271 235119276 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 29272 30401 9076725 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 29272 30401 9076693+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris

[DaGoomba]

Go to Terminal and type:

cat /etc/fstab

Post the output.

[askinne2]

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
# /dev/sda1
UUID=b49b4118-5423-498b-86e5-03d0b2f9146a / ext3 relatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1
# /dev/sda5
UUID=a97d1478-f2a8-47fa-b3ad-9cc861cfd6fd none swap sw 0 0
/dev/scd0 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,unhide,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0

[DaGoomba]

Hmm. That looks okay. Let's make sure your account has the correct memberships. Type:

groups your-user-name

Basically, the output should include "cdrom" but you can cut and paste the output if you're not sure.

[askinne2]

askinne2 adm dialout cdrom floppy audio dip video plugdev fuse lpadmin admin

Im guessing thats good. I really appreciate the help by the way, I hope we can get this thing working again.

[DaGoomba]

Hmm. Are you getting any error messages when attempting to write to a CD? (other than just "disk is read only," since that's understood). This could be an issue with dbus or something.

But, it could also be a permissions issue, like you thought at first. But, not with the drive itself, rather with the mountpoint. Can you post the output of this?:

ls -l /media

[askinne2]

Well, let me try to re-explain a bit. I assumed the drive was mounted as read only because when I started up the computer it wanted to do a fsck check. It failed to complete the check automatically and would not start up until I ran the check manually. So I did, and it said it needs to be in read only mode. And then the next line said it is in read only mode. So after running the check it fixed a few errors and I could finally start up again.

The main problem I have is that the cd drive isnt showing up at all. Normally when I insert a cd an icon will pop up on the desktop for it. And also it will appear in my computer. Nothing is coming up at all.

Anyways, maybe that will open more doors of possibilities of whats wrong? Heres the output for the command also:

total 4
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 6 2008-11-15 14:45 cdrom -> cdrom0
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2008-11-15 14:45 cdrom0

Thanks.

[DaGoomba]

Hmm. Try looking for the drive in the BIOS. The reason you will need to make sure this shows up in your computer's BIOS is that it may be damaged or need to be manually installed. If this is a CD-ROM that was built in the last 6 years it may just be defective as most drives are built PnP.