Problems reading CDs with Linux

[Jon McDonald]

Does anyone else notice that if you put a CD into the drive and return several minutes to an hour to read it, Linux has difficulty reading it. It is almost as if linux reads the CD as soon as you put it in, but if you are not requesting data from that CD regularly Linux can no longer read it. I usually have to open then close the CD player again to read it.
Also If you are looking at the contents of a CD through a Konquerer window, and then switch CDs, you can't read the new CD in that Konquerer window. I usually have to close the window and open up a new one.

Jon

[Alton Hernandez]

Does anyone else notice that if you put a CD into the drive and return several minutes to an hour to read it, Linux has difficulty reading it.

Can you please clarify what you mean by "reading it". Are you talking about a particular GUI program? Have you tried reading it by doing an 'ls' on it?
Perhaps it is only this particular program that is causing you trouble.

I usually have to open then close the CD player again to read it.

You don't need to do this. Just have a look if your CD is mounted. Try issuing the command df.
If your CD is mounted, just unmount (umount /mnt/cdrom) it and then mount it again (mount /mnt/cdrom).

[Jon McDonald]

Originally posted by Alton Hernandez:

You don't need to do this. Just have a look if your CD is mounted. Try issuing the command df.
If your CD is mounted, just unmount (umount /mnt/cdrom) it and then mount it again (mount /mnt/cdrom).

Sorry to get back to this so late. when I try to do this linux returns with
"umount /mnt/cdrom: device is busy"
but the the CD-ROM isn't doing anything, so that doesn't make any sense.
And this happens with all programs trying to read from the CD-ROM, GUI or command line.
Jon

[Adrian Yan]

that message is usually caused by something is referencing the directory. You might have something opened in that directory. Also, some linux distro doesn't do automount and autounmount, meaning that everytime you put in a new cd, you need to unmount the old one, and mount the new one again.

[Nart]

It might be the fam (File Alteration Monitor) process. Try killing that and umount again.
Nart