[sclug] Help! CD drive not being seen

[Neil Haughton]

I'm suffering from Homer Syndrome - I'm pushing so much Windows stuff into
my brain these days in order to earn a crust that my Linux expertise (such
as it was) has been pushed out.Can anyone give me some pointers?

My PC at home (Debian Squeeze) cannot read the CD/DVD drive. I'm not sure
what is wrong but my wife is due to go into hospital soon and I am keen to
get all her favourite CDs into Ogg or Flac format onto her music player
(are you reading this BPI?). So the pressure's on.

Trouble is that I am not sure what the problem is. The drive can clearly be
seen (dmesg and fstabs extract below) , and Sound Juicer has the device
listed as the only choice, but it cannot see the contents when a CD is
inserted.

dmesg:

    2.105189] scsi 1:0:0:0: CD-ROM            SAMSUNG  DVD-ROM SD-616F
 F100 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
[    2.121235] usb 2-1: New USB device found, idVendor=152d, idProduct=2329
[    2.121245] usb 2-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2,
SerialNumber=5
[    2.121251] usb 2-1: Product: USB to ATA/ATAPI Bridge
[    2.121255] usb 2-1: Manufacturer: JMicron
[    2.121259] usb 2-1: SerialNumber: 505CFFFFFFFF
[    2.121544] usb 2-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[    2.151024] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 160086528 512-byte logical blocks: (81.9
GB/76.3 GiB)
[    2.151153] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
[    2.151159] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
[    2.151213] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled,
doesn't support DPO or FUA
[    2.151540]  sda: sda1 sda2 <
[    2.165422] sd 0:0:1:0: [sdb] 78165360 512-byte logical blocks: (40.0
GB/37.2 GiB)
[    2.165559]  sda5
[    2.165639] sd 0:0:1:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
[    2.165647] sd 0:0:1:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00

fstab extract:


# /dev/hdc        /media/cdrom0   udf,iso9660 user,noauto     0       0
/dev/dvd        /media/cdrom0   udf,iso9660 user,noauto     0       0
# /dev/hdd        /media/cdrom1   udf,iso9660 user,noauto     0       0
/dev/cdrom        /media/cdrom1   udf,iso9660 user,noauto     0       0

mount command:

/dev/sda1 on / type ext3 (rw,errors=remount-ro)
tmpfs on /lib/init/rw type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,mode=0755)
proc on /proc type proc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
udev on /dev type tmpfs (rw,mode=0755)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=620)
/dev/sda5 on /boot type ext2 (rw)
/dev/sdb2 on /home type ext3 (rw,user_xattr)
/dev/sdb1 on /var type ext3 (rw)
/dev/sdc1 on /media/data_neil type ext2 (rw)
fusectl on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw)
binfmt_misc on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc
(rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)


So I'm not sure where to turn. I also have a CD Writer installed which is
no longer connected because it broke, so I unplugged the ribbon cable
meaning to attend to the problem later. Could it be that just unplugging
that physically has confused the system?

I have some fallback options, such as connect my Windows laptop and make
the CD drive a share and possibly access that as the source, or maybe rip
each ISO image to a file and mount that each time (sounds cumbersome), and
I could also buy an external USB CD drive and connect that, but I'd much
rather just use the drive I already have and have used before.

All and any useful help will be appreciated.

TIA

Neil.