Lost my cdrom/cdr

[Julio Gutierrez]

I was trying to install a couple of rpms from the mandrake cd and when I cd 
into /mnt/cdrom  it gave me an error saying 
bash: cd: /mnt/cdrom: Input/output error
why is this?
how did I lose it ?
is there a way I can get it working again?
can someone help?
by the way is a matsushita cd-r cw-7582 and it was woking before and it's 
also detected by the OS
TIA 
Julio
-- 
OS X : Because making UNIX user friendly was easier than debugging WINDOWS.