I was recently installing the VMWare tools onto a debian etch virtual machine which I downloaded from the thoughtpolice.co.uk site, and I ran into problems. When the installation instructions from thoughtpolice say to type

mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/

This gives me an error about "You must specify the mount type" or similar. I found that actually you should type:

mount /dev/cdrom

and see the disk appear in /media/cdrom0. Thanks to this article which helped me out (I am pretty sure its the same one that helped me last time we had this problem as well!).