removeable disks

[Kyrath. (AKA Rob)]

I'm finally starting to poke around my linux box and have been doing a lot of reading, since I really had no basic unix knowledge to start with.
I believe that I've got the mounting of my floppy and cd drives, but I'm not able to access files on my cd.  In fact, I was only able to see files on my floppy by using the "mdir" command.  Unfortunately, not even that seems to work for the cd drive at all.
I thought the linux was able to read dos/windows formatted disks?
If anyone can direct me to specific information/reading material regarding the use of disks and cds between a windoes and linux box, I would greatly appreciate it.
I'm currently using slackware 9.1.
-- Rob