It's probably not a hardware problem if you installed Linux from a CD. To mount a CD-ROM drive, do the following.

1. Create a mount point if it doesn't exist. Type "mkdir /mnt/cdrom"
2. Determine the device filename by looking in your message log. Type "dmesg" and scroll up (if you're in a window, otherwise you'll need to do "dmesg | less"), and find the lines that reference your drives. They will look something like (these are mine):

hda: WDC WD600BB-00CCB0, ATA DISK drive
blk: queue c03c7a20, I/O limit 4095Mb (mask 0xffffffff)
hdc: CD-R/RW RW7060A, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
hdd: DVD-ROM DDU220E, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
hda: attached ide-disk driver.
hda: host protected area => 1
hda: 117231408 sectors (60022 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=7297/255/63, UDMA(33)
hdc: attached ide-cdrom driver.
hdc: ATAPI 24X CD-ROM CD-R/RW drive, 2048kB Cache, DMA
Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.12
hdd: attached ide-cdrom driver.
hdd: ATAPI DVD-ROM drive, 512kB Cache, DMA

You can see from that that "hda" is my hard drive, "hdc" is my CD-R/RW drive, and "hdd" is my DVD-ROM drive. The filenames, respectively, would be /dev/hda, /dev/hdc, and /dev/hdd. Your setup might be different, but that's why you're doing this step.

3. Try a mount command with the device filename you determined in step 2. Do this with a valid CD in the drive: "mount /dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom"

4. If this works (it should), your drive will be mounted at /mnt/cdrom and you can access it through that directory. If it doesn't work, you either have a driver problem or a hardware problem. In either case, "dmesg" will show you the log and it should say something about the problem. Look at the section where it initiates the drives, and also at the bottom after trying to mount\read.

5. If you mounted the drive successfully, you can add it to /etc/fstab to make it easier in the future. Add a line like:

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

Now you can mount the drive just by typing "mount /mnt/cdrom" or "mount /dev/hdc".