I have a CD writer/DVD reader in my laptop. K3B can’t find it now. It was working an hour ago, then I upgraded firefox, and now it’s not working.
My username is added to the “cdrom” group in the Yast user management section.
As root, I entered “kde3 k3b” into the shell and it started K3B and found my CD/DVD drive. I don’t know why it can’t find it as a normal user.
Hmm…I remember how in Suse 10.3, I rebooted, and the problem fixed itself. That was strange. Anyway, if anyone might know what is wrong, I’d appreciate any pointers.
Is the device present in the K3B settings?
Under Devices, it says
Readonly Devices: none
Writer Devices: none
I’ve tried specifying the drive as /dev/dvd and also as /dev/sr0, but neither work. Maybe it is some other name…
Can you boot a live cd or install media of any kind?
Yep, I just booted from a Suse live DVD.
So is it just k3b that has issues. I mean can you read dvd’s etc in the file manager Dolphin or konqueror?
Yeah, Konqueror has no problem reading files on a disc. Other programs can read the disc, too. It’s just K3B that can’t find the drive. It can find the drive as superuser (root), but not as normal user.
Thanks for your help, by the way.
Try removing all k3b hidden files and folder in hidden username
My username is added to the “cdrom” group in the Yast user management section.
Undo that, it’s not necessary and might cause security issues.
I also recommend using a current version of K3B (the KDE4-version).
I removed “user” from the cdrom group. Then I installed K3B/KDE4, and it works! I don’t know what the problem was with K3B for KDE3.
Thank you for your help, everyone. I appreciate it.
The error came back. Even KDE4 K3B can’t find my DVD drive now. It gives me the option to “start K3B setup,” so I do…
under “settings,” it says “use burning group:” …and then what do I want to type in the Use Burning Group field? Should I type “root” or “cdrom”?
No programs that I have installed can access the DVD/CD drive. I can view files on the drive from the KDE desktop, but programs can’t find the drive. Does it matter if the DVD drive is not mentioned in fstab? Here is my fstab
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-INTEL_SSDSA2M080G2GN_CVPO0161048A080JGN-part1 / reiserfs acl,user_xattr,noatime 1 1
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-INTEL_SSDSA2M080G2GN_CVPO0161048A080JGN-part2 /home reiserfs acl,user_xattr,noatime 1 2
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-INTEL_SSDSA2M080G2GN_CVPO0161048A080JGN-part4 /windows/C ntfs-3g users,gid=users,fmask=133,dmask=022,locale=en_US.UTF-8 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults,noatime 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs noauto,noatime 0 0
debugfs /sys/kernel/debug debugfs noauto,noatime 0 0
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs noauto,noatime 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5,noatime 0 0
tmpfs /var/log tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=0755 0 0
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0
tmpfs /var/tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0
Optical drives even shouldn’t be in the fstab.
Even KDE4 K3B can’t find my DVD drive now. It gives me the option to “start K3B setup,” so I do…
under “settings,” it says “use burning group:” …and then what do I want to type in the Use Burning Group field? Should I type “root” or “cdrom”?
I am not sure (really not), but to me this sounds like you are using the KDE3-version again (I don’t remember the KDE4-version of K3B starting a setup dialogue by itself). Unfortunately I can not confirm any of this, as my K3B-version crashes when I try to call the settings dialogue (it’s a known bug). Either way: your user should neither be in ‘cdrom’ nor ‘root’.
I’m using Suse 11.1 with KDE3. I’m trying to use the K3B that was built for KDE4 though…it was working for a few days, but now it won’t find the DVD drive all of a sudden.
Should I be in the “users” group? Yast says I’m not, right now.
By default a KDE3 environment will start the KDE3 version of K3B. Try to force starting the KDE4 version by calling the full path:
/usr/bin/k3b
[as opposed to /opt/kde3/bin/k3b, which will start the KDE3 version of K3B]
…does that give you any difference?
Should I be in the “users” group? Yast says I’m not, right now.
Absolutely! Edit: that might need a reboot to take effect]
You should have much more trouble not being in ‘users’! 
A few ideas:
fstab won’t have removable device entries. These are dynamically created in /etc/mtab, you can look there.
You might have more info running dmesg in a terminal after inserting a disk, it will show you the kernel/udev/hal/whatever messages.
Check to see if /dev/dvd exists, where it point to, what it’s original permissions are, to which group it belongs and if the group has r/w rights. Add yourself to said group for testing.
If permissions are wrong it’s probably a wrong udev rule, you can rename the original rules file and it will be recreated (at the next reboot IINM). There’s an unreviewed how-to here that may help with that.
Note that the users group may not ticked in Yast’s additional user groups list because it already is your standard group, as shown in the pull-down menu to the bottom left of the groups list in Yast>Local Users>Details. At least this is so in oS11.1.