Troubleshooting your CD-ROM in Linux

Troubleshooting your CD-ROM in Linux

If you are unable to play CDs on your CD-ROM drive in Linux, here are a few things you can try to make it work:

- Verify that your sound card is installed and working properly.

- Verify that the CD-ROM drive was detected when you booted Linux. If your CD-ROM drive is an IDE drive, type dmesg | grep ^hd. You should see messages about your CD-ROM that look like this:

hdc: CD-ROM CDU701, ATAPI CDROM drive

or

ATAPI 14X CD-ROM drive, 128kB Cache

- If you see no indication of a CD-ROM drive, verify that the power supply and cables to the CD-ROM are connected. To make sure that the hardware is working, you can also boot to DOS/Windows and try to access the CD.

- Try inserting a software CD-ROM. If you are running the GNOME or KDE desktop, a desktop icon should appear indicating that the CD mounted by itself. If no such icon appears, go to a Terminal window and type mount /media/cdrecorder. Then list the contents using ls /media/cdrecorder command. This tells you if the CD-ROM is accessible.

- If you get the CD-ROM working, but it fails with the message CDROM device: Permission denied when you try to play music as a nonroot user, the problem may be that the device related to that medium is not readable by anyone but root. Type mount |grep media to see what device name represents the drive. Then as the root user, type chmod /dev/hdc to enable all users to read your CD-ROM and to enable that root user to write to it.