VL 5.9 on laptop doesn't recognize CD drive

[LinuxLiker]

I'm using a Panasonic Toughbook CF-45 with a Mobile Pentium MMX processor and 153mb of ram. It isn't mounting CD's when I put them in the CD drive, (although the computer spins them when I first insert them, as you would expect when a computer is first trying to read a disk).
Trying to get to the CD isn't easy, either. When I click on the desktop icon in the system tray, nothing happens. I have to open the file manager, then click the desktop icon to get to the cd icon, but then clicking the icon doesn't show anything.

Does anyone know any thing I can do to get computer to recognize the cd drive? Thanks.

[M0E-lnx]

Are you using HAL or VL-Hot to manage your removable media?

If you are using HAL, it *should* auto mount your data CD's when inserted. But to be safe, try this in a terminal as root

Code:

df -h

You should see your mounted filesystems there. Cd's normally mount to /mnt/cdrom.. or /media/<CD_LABEL> if handled by HAL. If you do not see either of these in the output, then try this

Code:

mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom

If you get no errors, try navigating to /mnt/cdrom and see if your cd's contents are in there..
if you get errors, post them here.