I've got two different cd drives, one is a regular cdrw, the other is a dvd/cdrw. I'm curious if in the rc.local file, if I add

ln -s hdc /dev/cdrom
ln -s hdc /dev/cdrw

if the multiple aliases for the same device will disrupt and functioning?

I'd be doing the same to the dvd/cdrw if it were ok to do.

ln -s hdd /dev/cdrw2
ln -s hdd /dev/dvd
ln -s hdd /dev/cdrom2

Any thoughts?

Don't know if that would work but seems like your asking for trouble... Why not just re-mount the drives /hdc /hdd to different mount points depending on what's in the dirve at the time...

KC

thats what I usually do, but its kinda a pain in the butt to have to do that all the time when I put a new media in

There has to be an automatic way to do it

I don´t understand how it would cause problems linking the same device like that. The only thing is it might confuse you! I must admit I don´t quite understand what your trying to acomplish

I'm just wondering if I can get a single physical device be seen as multiple devices by the operating system

Works just fine. Despite what others may tell you, it's actually fairly common practice. If you don't believe me, run "find /dev -type l" to see all the symbolic links in you /dev directory. If you're running a mainstream distro, you'll probably see a few.

If you wanted to, you could also copy /dev/hdd to /dev/cdrom with the same effect, but it could get confusing that way. Symlinks are the preferred method of aliasing devices.

Note that you don't have to alias the device *every time you boot* unless your /dev directory is stored on a ramdisk (like udev). Linking it once will do.