Hi there,

I'am a relatively experienced windows user but am fed up by all commercial tricks that MS tries to play. I would love to replace Windows by Linux...

I just downloaded and installed the ISO images and installed Mandrake 9.1
At first, all seems fine, installation was easy, the KDE X-windows system works fine.
Really nice!

I use an Athlon 800, 256 Mb with 3 hard disks (hda for windows Me, hdb for Mandrake and hdc as a windows vfat data storage disk), I have a scsi NCR860 with yamaha cd writer and a IDE- LG-DVD-ROM player. I have a home network running with a ADSL router. So the next step is to be able to share my laser printer and data disk to the other family members in the (windows)network. The connection to the internet was correctly installed from the start.

Here comes my first problem. After installation the windows drives (hda and hdc) were mounted and I can easily access them (rw). To my surprise I cannot read files from CD from my DVD player and also not from the yamaha writer and my floppy drive. I'm puzzled. When I click the desktop icon of the dvd-player, Konquerer starts (without error messages) but the window is empty (in spite of the presence of a CD). It looks like the player is not activated or anything. The KDiskFree utility does not show the mounting of the CD player....

I looked a bit into mounting and looked in the fstab file. Things seem a bit funny to me: (as far as I can judge). Apparently the system names for the two cd players are hdd and scd0. When I look into the /dev directory I find a subdirectory with the name /dev/cdroms with two shortcuts to cdrom0 and cdrom1. The shortcut points to deep nested subdirectories in some ide or scsi subdirectories. No trace to hdd or scd0. However, in the /dev directory I also see a hdd shortcut (and many, many more) that also points to the deeply nested ide directory. So apparantly the system places the device in the nested ide or scsi directory and not in the /dev directory. Is that correct? All this doesn get me anywhere though.....
I don have a clue how to proceed.
Is anybody able to help me? How to fix this? Help is greatly appreciated.
Below my listing of fstab:

/dev/hdb2 / ext3 defaults 1 1
/dev/hdb1 /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0
none /mnt/cdrom supermount dev=/dev/hdd,fs=auto,ro,--,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0
none /mnt/cdrom2 supermount dev=/dev/scd0,fs=auto,ro,--,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0
none /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=auto,--,iocharset=iso8859-15,sync,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0
/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows_C vfat iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850,umask=0
/dev/hdc1 /mnt/windows_D vfat iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850,umask=0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hdb3 swap swap defaults 0 0

I have searched for other threads with this problems, but the problems reported seem all to be slightly different, usually hard drives cannot be adressed. This is no problem for me. Did I miss the relevant thread?

Lenny

What kind of CD are you trying to view? Audio CDs or movie DVDs can not be viewed like in windowsl.

This could be a supermount problem. With a data CD inserted in the DVD drive open up a console window and try:
mount /mnt/cdrom

If that doesn't work try as root
mount -t iso9660 /dev/hdd /mnt/cdrom

Thanks Michael!

Part of the problems are solved. I used a CD-audio to check the operation of the CD. When I replaced it by a data-CD, I could immediately read the CD.

However.... the cd-writer is still not functioning. I get a very funny message: /mnt/cdrom2 cannot be openend, insufficient privilige or something like that
Then, I logged in as root and I couldn't access the directory /mnt/cdrom2 it was locked and I didn't have the permission to enter???? How is that possible?

The floppy has some pecularities as well. It reads the contents of the first floppy I enter. Then when I replace the flop by another it keeps coming back with the contents of the first flop, even after shutting down Konquerer end restarting it and also after pushing the refresh button. I've seen this kind of question in one of the threads before. Don't have the time to check right now.

More advise is very welcome! Thanks.

Lenny

Did you have anything besides Konqueror accessing the floppy? Are you trying to view the contents of the floppy by opening the removable media icon and the floppy icon?

You might want to try disabling supermount. This will require you to manually mount / umount floppies and CDs. see man pages for supermount to disable.

This might help with the locked drive:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...t=locked+cdrom

Hi Michael,

The system is still not responding well. After some playing around I decided to disable supermount (following your advise). The following fstab was the result:

dev/hdb2 / ext3 defaults 1 1
none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0
/dev/hdd /mnt/cdrom auto codepage=850,noauto,iocharset=iso8859-15,nosuid,ro,umask=0,user,nodev 0 0
/dev/scd0 /mnt/cdrom2 auto codepage=850,noauto,iocharset=iso8859-15,nosuid,ro,umask=0,user,nodev 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto codepage=850,sync,unhide,noauto,iocharset=iso8859-15,nosuid,umask=0,user,nodev 0 0
/dev/hda1 /mnt/win_c vfat iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0
/dev/hdc1 /mnt/win_c2 vfat iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hdb3 swap swap defaults 0 0

All shortcuts to devices dissappeared from the desktop.
Starting up a terminal (user mode) and executing the command: mount /mnt/cdrom worked well. A shortcut icon appeared on the desktop and by double clicking the icon I started Konquerer and could access the files on the IDE CD/DVD player. So far so good. I could also umount the CD/DVD without problems. The same holds for the harddisks hda and hdc.
Next step. Doing the same for the writer: mount /mnt/cdrom2 immediatly resulted in an error message: "I could not detemine the filesystem type and none was specified".
Then I tried: mount -t iso9660 /dev/scd0 /mnt/cdrom2
error message: "mount only root can do that"
OK, consequently started a terminal in super user mode and tried again:
error message: mount: block device /dev/scd0 is write protected, mounting read only
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/scd0 or too many mounted file systems.
Well, do you understand this? The same CD as in the CD/DVD rom player...., also the same iso specs in the fstab and also an iso9660 specification in the manual mount command as root user! What else can I do?

Also the floppy is behaving weird. After executing the mount /mnt/floppy command in the user terminal, the desktop icon appeared. After double clicking Konquere starts but report 0 files. Nothing to see!? Then returned to the terminal user and typed: umount /dev/floppy , this was counterattacked by the error message: device is busy. One hour later I still did not see any files in Konquerer. How to cope with this? Even in the root terminal I could umount!

I am beginning to feel a bit uncomfortable.... Is this normal? Is this typical for Mandrake? Am I stupid? Help!

Lenny

Normal? Not usually. Not sure if it is due to mixing SCSI and SCSI emulation.

If you still had the Konqueror windows still open to /mnt/floppy you will get the device is busy message. You need to close all apps, windows etc before unmounting.

Need some info here. Post the output of the following:

ls -l /dev/scd0

cat /proc/scsi/scsi

Hi Michael,

The floppy problem is solved. After I closed all Konquerer windows and mounted the floppy, I could access it. Then after closing all Konquerer windows again I could umount the floppy.

The output of
ls -l /dev/scd0 is:
r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 31 Oct 13 20:28 /dev/scd0 -> scsi/host0/ bus0/target3/lun0/cd

The output of cat /proc/scsi/scsi is:
Attached devices:
Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 03 Lun: 00
Vendor: YAMAHA Model: CRW4416S Rev: 1.0j
Type: CD-ROM ANSI SCSI revision: 02

I can confirm the model of the CD writer. Hope this helps.
Thanks for your continued help. Do not be afraid, I will not give up.
I am getting curious what kind of problem I have.

Lenny

Me too. It all looks good to me.

Try mounting the writer again. Make sure any file browser or console terminal is not accessing /mnt/cdrom2.

I closed all applications, shut down the computer and rebooted.
On a clean desktop started the terminal (in user mode) and tried to mount. The result was exactly the same as before: mount only root can do that.
Next I closed the terminal and restarted the terminal in super user mode. After the mount command I got exactly the same messages as before........
Mmmmh......???

I am having the same problems after upgrading the kernel to 2.6.1. I can mount my cdrom manually but not auto. I installed the supermount batch and did the xconfig but did not recompile the kernel. I got the same results. Any proposed solutions?

Problem solved. I found the solution by trial and error. I just deleted the hdc=ide-scsi from my grub file and it did work fine. I came to this idea after knowing that kernel 2.6.0 does not need the scsi emulation to write to the cd. My DVD rom is mounting correctly.