Its working again today, I've been using linux since 98, you learn something every day. I think one thing would help linux is a brief orientation to whats under the hood, these useful little command line utilities. There's another one which is an undelete utility, trouble is I've forgotten what the command is. I'm sure it is in knoppix, I deleted a secondary partition on my laptop and lost the logicals attached to it... I had everything backed up except one directory and have managed to reconstruct most of the files from that.
Thanks again.
David.

root@Tbird:/home/drg# lsof /mnt/auto/cdrom
COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE NODE NAME
kdeinit 1064 drg 128r DIR 11,0 2048 233472 /mnt/auto/cdrom