Blanking a rewritable CD/DVD in GNOME

Chances are that your removable media preferences in GNOME are set in a way so that CDs get mounted automatically. There is a usability bug that comes into play whenever you try to blank an already written rewritable CD or DVD with Gnomebaker or directly with the command-line tool (cdrecord). An error message that the volume is already mounted is displayed and the operation cannot continue. Unmounting the volume as a user is not possible because, nowadays, /etc/fstab does not contain any entries about the mounted CDs/DVDs like it used to.

So, in order to blank that rewritable CD, you have to do one of the following:

-1- Eject the medium, set your “removable media preferences” in a way so that CDs do not get mounted automatically, and then load the medium into the drive again and continue on with blanking it.

-2- Use su or sudo to unmount the medium. Although this is the most common solution to such issues, I think that root access should not be required in order to accomplish everyday tasks of such simplicity.

-3- The third way involves using the utility gnome-mount. I found out about this today, while, from the nautilus interface, I was unable to directly unmount the volume as a user without ejecting it. The syntax is very simple. Assuming that /dev/hdc is your writer, then issue the following command as a user:

$ gnome-mount --unmount -d /dev/hdc

The volume gets unmounted, but the CD still remains loaded into the drive. If there is another way to perform this task through a graphical interface, I’d appreciate it if you dropped me a line.

-4- Yes, there is always an extra option :) Use brasero (ex bonfire). This is yet another desktop CD/DVD burning application, but it is smart enough to unmount the written rewritable medium before trying to blank it! And it is good when applications are a bit smart ;)

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