CD and DVD Drive Hanging

On rare occassion, my CD or DVD drive will hang. The disc will show up on the desktop, but I can not eject it by right clicking. When this is the case, pressing the physical button on the drive often doesn't work either.

(I'm actually writing this post long after the fact... I think I did this to get it solved: )

In /etc/fstab, edit the line that looks like this:

/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom udf,iso9660 noauto,ro 0 0

to this:

/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom udf,iso9660 noauto,user,ro 0 0

Also try:

chmod 777 /bin/mount /bin/umount