Need to change permissions on a DVD I burnt

Those slashes are part of the DVD's name on the desktop?

If so, that's likely the whole reason you can't copy anything from the DVD. A slash in the Terminal means that you are separating one folder from the next in a path. It's trying to find the folder Classclown with a subfolder named sep2002, and so on.

Is that right, or is this a path of folders on the disk?

Actually, if that is the name of the disk, you should still be able to use quotes to turn the slashes into characters instead of path separators. You also left out the leading slash and final slash. Without the last slash, "surf" is assumed to be the name of a file, not a folder. If what you posted is the name of the disk, then you would type this in the Terminal:

cd "/volumes/Classclown/sep2002/shoop/shtuck/simpleLife/Spin/start/sum41/surf/"

If that works, that should then display as part of your prompt in Terminal. Do the list command ( ls ) to see if you can indeed list the contents of the disk. If you can, continue on as above.

Else try:

cd /volumes/"Classclown/sep2002/shoop/shtuck/simpleLife/Spin/start/sum41/surf/"

Note that I moved the first quote so it encloses only the name of the disk. At the beginning (before /volumes/), the Terminal would likely treat all of those slashes as folder separators.

Sorry, I was over thinking those slashes. Since there is no slash at the end of the name of the disk, there shouldn't be one on the cd command. It should be:

cd /volumes/"Classclown/sep2002/shoop/shtuck/simpleLife/Spin/start/sum41/surf"

If after you press Enter the next prompt in the Terminal shows that lengthy path, you'll know you're there.

I have come DVD-RAM disks I made on a standalone DVD recorder which I cannot access normally. However, as root, I can access them and copy their contents. It's a permissions thing, which is what I expect you are seeing. An administrator is not all-powerful, as is root.

Try this:
Activate the root on your machine if you have not already done so. You will then see "Other" in the login window or if you use fast switching, when you switch to another user.
In the "Other" account, enter
root
and the password you assigned to root
You should be able to copy the files on any CD or DVD, irrespective of any permissions. If you still cannot do so, then there is another issue.

it showed up in Terminal as Classclown:sep2002:shoop:shtuck:simpleLife:Spin:start:sum41:surf

You may remember from OS 9 and earlier that the colon was the only character you couldn't use. That's because it's the one the OS used to denote as path separators.

While some apps will let you use a / or \ in OS X, you really never should since the underlying UNIX OS considers both of them separators. So when you dragged the disk name into the Terminal, the OS basically told you that by turning the slashes into colons.

So my original thought on this was correct. The OS thinks you have a disk named "Classclown". Everything else is seen as a string of subfolders that don't exist.

Can't hurt to try this, assuming the OS believes the name of the disk is Classclown.

cd /volumes/Classclown/"sep2002/shoop/shtuck/simpleLife/Spin/start/sum41/surf"

Or this slight variation to account for the first slash in the name.

cd /volumes/Classclown/"/sep2002/shoop/shtuck/simpleLife/Spin/start/sum41/surf"

So I could actually try a few things instead of just suggesting, I burned a CD with Toast 9, giving it the exact same name as your disk. I was surprised Toast let me put in all of those slashes, but it did.

The resulting disk duplicated your problem. It will mount on the desktop, but in an immediate result of the bad name, I can't drag it to any other position on the desktop. It stays locked below the last drive of those I have mounted. Also like yours, the OS will let me open the disk by double clicking on it, but I can't drag any of the files off the disk, giving me the same "no" symbol.

I've tried all sorts of naming strategies in the Terminal, but it simply returns "No such file or directory" each time. Your only hope may be to put the disk in a Mac with a DVD drive that can boot to OS 9. Then you can get past the problem with the slashes and copy things off.

As far as OS 9, I wrote in an earlier post about how the files were copied but when transferred to the OS X, they came up as Unix exec files and I could not find a way to change them back.

That may just be because they lost their Type and Creator codes along the way. The files themselves should still be intact, you just need to assign the correct codes to them, or file extension.

Bizarre situation!

Open a Terminal window and type this:

ls -lea (hit spacebar, drag DVD icon into Terminal window, press return)

Paste the results here in this thread.

white circle with a line through it....

The only time I've seen that is when I tried to work with OS9 files on a Mac that cannot run OS9, or the data file requires and OS9 program to run.

that may explain why you can access the files on an OS9 machine, but not your current one.

generic unix icons - files with no resource forks, or Windows executables.