CD Automount problem

[Patton Echols]

For some time I have been using sound juicer to extract tunes to my 
laptop.  Normal procedure is to insert CD, it automounts as a music CD 
and Sound Juicer runs. 

I recently tried to extract from a CD that had a multimedia component. 
It would not mount, in fact all it did was freeze up the drive.  
Nautilus did not show it as a mounted disk, the eject command in a 
terminal simply did nothing (didn't even return to a prompt, just sat 
there) and pushing the eject button on the drive did nothing.  I finally 
ended up shutting down to eject the disk.  I re-booted into windows and 
was able to load the CD, it was a sony disk that auto runs some kind of 
splash.  I cancelled all the things it started and was able to use a 
windows tool to extract.  But that result is hardly satisfying.

I had thought that I could kill the process that was trying to load the 
disk and then force mount the cd (or at least eject it without having to 
shut down the computer)  The instructions I had read on that once before 
said to use "top" to see what processes are running.  Uhhh, ok, even 
reading the man pages, I am clueless how I would use top to do what I 
needed.  It just kept refreshing and showing the running processes, not 
the one(s) that had - for example -tied up my cd drive.

So question 1 is:  anyone have guidance generally about how to use top 
and get useful information out of it?

Question 2: Any thoughts on my specific problem?  Even if I had killed 
the process, I'm not sure the right way to manually mount a music cd or 
what I should have done with this one. 

Thanks for all thoughts.

Patton