Some time ago I swapped out the CD drive on my Dell latitude for a second battery and everything was fine (8-12 hours of battery life =] ). Though when reattaching the CD drive I'm unable to mount any disks, but updates through Yast are still possible and other removable devices can automount. Tried using the konsole but I get an error saying that hdc isn't in fstab or "files nis does not provide any mounts" when enabling autofs. After reading some other threads I've edited fstab, mtab, auto.misc and sadly no changes. Any ideas before I consider reinstalling or switching to a permanent Slax installation.



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Mainboard : Dell Latitude CPx J750GT
Processor : Intel Pentium III E @ 750 MHz
Physical Memory : 512 MB (2 x 256 SDRAM )
Video Card : ATI Technologies Inc Rage P/M Mobility AGP 2x 8MB
Hard Disk : IBM-DJSA-220 (20 GB)
CD-Rom Drive : SAMSUNG CD-ROM SN-124
Network Card : Broadcom BCM4309 802.11a/b/g
Operating System : openSuSE 10.2 / Windows XP Professional SP 2

be shure you edited fstab & the rest corectley (I wonce had a simalar prob and it wus /dev/hdd not dev/cdrom and then
Try chmod 666 /dev/cdrom (or /dev/hdc, or whatever your CD-ROM drive is).permishons for dev/cdrom or wutever it is mite have ben lost? but then I use a slackware based distro. so??????

VINNY

Check your bios. Does it see the cdrom? Maybe the bios lost it and since bios doesn't see the drive linux can't see it either thus being unable to mount it.

check FSTAB
#cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab1 ////backup fstab
#vi /etc/fstab ///edit fstab
check the following line:
/dev/cdrom /media/cdrom auto ro,noauto,user,exec 0 0
and u r done

Found a similar fix before I posted my dilemma. The line was missing all together, went and inserted it, rebooted and no change. When I tried this one, like before no success... but it did make the drive sound like weed eater

Yes the bios detects it, it can boot a live system, and Windows had no problem swapping the drive with the battery without rebooting.

Like stated before the strange thing is that applications like yast are able to access the drive for updates, though browsing media disks is still out of reach.

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Sounds like your cd-rom drive is defective (dust got into the mechanism while improperly stored away, maybe?), since editing fstab would do nothing to the sound of the drive itself.

Swap in a friend's drive and see if it mounts (keeping the line you added in fstab, of course).

Nothing, dammit this sucks.

Went and ran the repair function from the installation disk, it fixed a corrupt drive, though found nothing wrong with fstab entries

What are these "friends" you speak of? This word is foreign to me, explain its significance.

But seriously, I've never seen anyone with an old clunker like this with whom I could cross reference. I'm pretty sure the drive isn't bad. Windows, livelinux systems, even DOS work well with it. Its just the locally installed linux system that's giving me problems.

i think you CDROM is connected to Secondary Master(hdc for linux)
you can try this command...
#mkdir /mnt/tt
#mount -t iso9660 /dev/hdc /mnt/tt