/dev/cdrom is not a valid block device

I hope its ok to post this here, if not, sorry.
Here is my problem:

Just recently installed RH 7 on a P100 to act as a Gateway for my home network
and as a firewall.

During the install I managed to enable anonymous ftp.

I was trying to figure out a way to disable (wu_ftpd) anon login, well, to make a
long story short I got rooted

Since I didn't have anything of value on the HD I decided to format and re-install
just to make sure there wasn't any back-doors left.

Install went fine and I made sure anon ftp was disabled this time around.

After I got the machine booted up I decided to install Tripwire from my RH disc

mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom yeilded-> /dev/cdrom is not a valid block device.
mount -t iso9660 /dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom reports the same error

dmesg | grep ^hd yeilds:
<snip hda info>
hdc: driver not present

So, my question is this: is there any way at all to correct this w/o having to re-install?
Thanks in advance.

Have you perchance compiled a custom kernel? It sounds an awful lot like you either don't have ATAPI CD-ROM support or you don't have iso9660 file system support in your kernel. Or maybe the module isn't getting loaded properly.