I've been having some CDROM issues for quite a while now, that I haven't been able to solve, and this is pretty much the last place I can think of going to try to get some help on this. Basically what's happening is that both my CDrw, and DVD/CDrw drives are not working. Well, sometimes if I reboot my computer, and there's already a CD in there, or if I put one in there shortly afterwards, it will work. Only problem is that after a while, it could be 5 minutes, up to an hour or more, the CD will just disappear. It will be unmounted, gone, the drive will say there's nothing in there when the CD is obviously still there.

Some background on the issue, I'm using a hybrid of Ubuntu 10.4, and Kubuntu 10.4 64 bit. I had installed the kubuntu-desktop package later on after installng just Ubuntu. I thought at first that this problem just came out of the blue, maybe it had started right after install and I didn't notice, but I did install Ubuntu fine with one of the drives. But what I'm thinking may, or may not have been part of the problem was back when I only had Ubuntu and I was trying to install Doom 3 via the CD's, I had put one of the cds in my CDRW, and nothing was loading, so I tried to eject it. I hit eject, the tray came out, then it popped right back in before I could get the CD out. It did that quite a few times until I could finally grab the CD quick enough before it went back in. The tray works fine now, but I thought that was odd, and maybe that started something? Also, after that in the Disk Utility I have had from my Ubuntu install, it recognizes both my drives, but a lot of the time my CDRW (the one giving me the tray option) keeps claiming there's about 1 gig of unrecognized media in there, yet when I hit eject it claims there's nothing in the drive. When I try to format the unrecognized media, it claims there's nothing to format because there's nothing in there. But yet at the same time it is saying there's something in there. It's very odd.

Anyways, I've tried mounting it through the terminal and I either get something like this:

matt@matt-desktop:~$ sudo mount /dev/sr0 /mnt/cdrom/
[sudo] password for matt:
mount: /dev/sr0: unknown device

or mount tells me there's no media on /dev/sr0 or something to that nature.

I had nothing in my fstab for my drives, so I added to it at the bottom here:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid -o value -s UUID' to print the universally unique identifier
# for a device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name
# devices that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc nodev,noexec,nosuid 0 0
# / was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=6a285cae-8621-45c3-9773-ae2b696d8307 / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1
# swap was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=b2a26dbb-0934-4212-8250-28febd24b8d6 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/sr0 /mnt/cdrom udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0
/dev/sr1 /mnt/cdrom udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0

I don't know if that's the right thing to put in there or not. My CD drives are recognized on the BIOS, and I've tried so many different mounting options using sr0, sr1, cdrom, cdrom1, cdrw, cdrw1.

here's some ls -l that I did:

matt@matt-desktop:~$ ls -l /dev/cdrom
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 2010-05-06 12:47 /dev/cdrom -> sr0
matt@matt-desktop:~$ ls -l /dev/cdrom1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 2010-05-06 12:47 /dev/cdrom1 -> sr1
matt@matt-desktop:~$ ls -l /dev/cdrw
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 2010-05-06 12:47 /dev/cdrw -> sr0
matt@matt-desktop:~$ ls -l /dev/cdrw1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 2010-05-06 12:47 /dev/cdrw1 -> sr1

Now, I don't know if I screwed something up in fstab, but ever since I put what I have for my cddrives in there that I posted, I can't seem to boot a cd, at all. Even after reboot. When I do dmesg | tail , after putting in a cd and waiting a few seconds, I get this:

matt@matt-desktop:~$ dmesg | tail
[ 1870.560076] ata2: EH complete
[ 3009.625946] __ratelimit: 12 callbacks suppressed
[ 3009.625952] npviewer.bin[2037]: segfault at ff999ea8 ip 00000000ff999ea8 sp 00000000ffd2ce2c error 14
[ 3073.377112] npviewer.bin[2105]: segfault at ff999ea8 ip 00000000ff999ea8 sp 00000000ffed283c error 14
[ 3254.602233] npviewer.bin[2245]: segfault at ff999ea8 ip 00000000ff999ea8 sp 00000000ffb8e43c error 14
[ 3477.724766] npviewer.bin[2381]: segfault at ff999ea8 ip 00000000ff999ea8 sp 00000000fff52dbc error 14
[ 3963.847657] npviewer.bin[2724]: segfault at ff999ea8 ip 00000000ff999ea8 sp 00000000ffa5c57c error 14
[ 4136.917557] npviewer.bin[2792]: segfault at ff999ea8 ip 00000000ff999ea8 sp 00000000ffdbcc1c error 14
[ 4198.015360] npviewer.bin[2853]: segfault at ff999ea8 ip 00000000ff999ea8 sp 00000000ff9452cc error 14
[ 4622.418513] npviewer.bin[3220]: segfault at ff999ea8 ip 00000000ff999ea8 sp 00000000ffb7683c error 14

Which was a lot different then what that command gave me before, I had a more simplified fstab for my cd drives then, and it kept complaining about VFS drives of some sort, I wish I remembered exactly.

If you need any more information, I'd be glad to give it. I'd really love to solve this problem. Thanks for your time!

The npviewer.bin entries in dmesg seem to be a red herring, npviewer.bin is the Adobe Flash plugin.

You shouldn't really need fstab entries, either. I don't have them on any of my boxes, mounting is handled by KDE via HAL so these entries aren't necessary.

What is the output of ls -l /dev/sr*

For cdrom drive fstab entries, try:

/dev/sr0 /mnt/cdrom auto user,noauto,ro 0 0
/dev/sr1 /mnt/cdrom1 auto user,noauto,ro 0 0

Assuming sr0 and sr1 are your drives. Make sure the cdrom and cdrom1 folders exist:

sudo mkdir /mnt/cdrom /mnt/cdrom1