I'e been messing around during the last month with Mandrake, Knoppix, and now Fedora core 1...thinking that one of these distros my solve the problem of fully recognizing my cd-rom/dvd-rom(RW).

When I tried Knoppix from the Live-Cd, I could see both of the icons for my cd-rom and dvd-rom saying that they were mounted, but after I installed it, I couldn't see any of them, so I decided to try Fedora and I'd really like to stick with Fedora.

I know that both of my cd-rom and dvd-rom are recognized during booting and I know that I am able to browse data cds if I do a right click in the desktop -> disks -> cdrom, which brings up an icon into the desktop and from which I am able to click on the icon and browse the cds.

I try issuing the commans mount /dev/cdrom, and mount /dev/cdrom1 and for both of them I get a result of "no medium found"
I also do a "ls -al /dev/cdrom" and ls -al /dev/cdrom1" and for the my cd-rom it points to /dev/hdd, and for my dvd points to /dev/scd0. And I sometimes, I don't remember how, but I got a result of saying something about block device...

When I tried watching a movie with Xine, then of couse, I can't watch a movie because it says something about not finding a pluging to MRL dvd:/

If anybody has had this similar problem, please help in configuring both of these cd-roms or please tell what I need to do.

Lots of confusion there...

If you can browse data CDs by right clicking the desktop it means that your CD and DVD drives are ok.

The mount command only works if you have a data CD in the drive...

This means your CD drive is connected to the secondary IDE bus, configured as slave, and your DVD is the first SCSI device. No problems about this...

Playing a DVD movie is a different story, you must insert the DVD disk but not mount it. Then go to one of the menus that says something like 'play DVD'. By default xine will try to use the device /etc/dvd, you can change this in xine's settings or you can create a new alias for your DVD device:
ln -s /dev/cdrom1 /dev/dvd

Thank you Pedro for responding. ..I really appreciated.

I created a new alias for the DVD as you recomended. Then, I did a Xine-check and now it displays this, do you know what this means? Sorry, I'm relative new to new this...

"[ good ] /dev/cdrom points to /dev/hdd
[ good ] /dev/dvd points to /dev/scd0
[ hint ] Your DVD drive seems not to be attached via ATAPI.
This might be due to the use of an ide-scsi emulation.
If you really have a SCSI DVD drive, your SCSI controller is likely
to do perfect DMA, so there's no reason to worry about this.
However, if you're using ide-scsi, there is a chance that DMA is
disabled for the DVD drive. Moreover, I don't know how to enable
DMA in that case, so you probably have to live with some performance
loss. (FIXME: check for /proc/ide, provide solution)
press <enter> to continue...
"

Xine should be able to play any movies, right? I'm getting an error saying "can't read source, maybe you don't have enough rights for this, or source doesn't contain data (e.g. not disc in drive). (Error reading NAV packet)" <-- Does anybod know how to fix this?

Thanks Pedro...the line you gave "ln -s /dev/cdrom1 /dev/dvd" was right on the money. All I had to do later was to download and intall Libdvdcss to play the encrypted dvds. Dvd is now working

One task down, a couple more to go...

great you've made it work! Thats right, to play enchripted DVDs you have to install Libdvdcss.
About the messages from xine-check: in your case I think you have a real SCSI disk, this is much faster then IDE hard disk so it is ok to play DVDs. If you have an IDE hard disk you should enable DMA transfer using hdparm utility or editing /etc/sysconfig/harddisks (look up the hwo-to)

Could someone please help. I am using RH 8.0

1. When I try to access my CD rom (With Linux distribution 2 or anything) in it it gives me the following message in the Terminal

[root@localhost root]# mount /dev/cdrom
mount: No medium found

2. When I try it from the desktop (eg: righ Cick and select CD ROM) it gives me the following message.

" Nautilus was unable to mount the volume. There is probably no media in the device." when I press more details it gives the following message "mount: No medium found".


3. Thi is my: ls -al /dev/cdrom
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 8 Feb 17 09:09 /dev/cdrom -> /dev/hdc

4. This is my: mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom
mount: block device /dev/cdrom is write-protected, mounting read-only
mount: No medium found

Please help with step by step command line instructions. Thank you in advance.

I seen this kinds of messages before when I tried mounting a cd into my cdrom. I'm also still trying to get more familiar with mounting and unmounting cd-roms and I've noticed on screenshots of people's desktop that a lot of them have an icon that'll say "mounted at /mnt/cdrom."

Is there are way to automount cd-roms when booting up?

Sanjeewa, have you tried adding a symlink pointing to your cdrom?
I'm guessing that in most cases that's what the problem is. Try the line that Pedro post it. "ln -s /dev/cdrom1 /dev/dvd" But in your case it might be "ln -s /dev/cdrom /dev/hdc", and you probably have to do it through root acces.

Hopefully someone will correct us and post more details about your case.

The problem must be exactly what the message says! No medium found, wich means that the is no CD disk in the CD reader! Try different CD disks, maybe the CD you'r using is not good. Maybe it is the CD reader that is not good...

This is not very usefull, as you'll have to always have a CD disk inside the CD reader, otherwise you'll have an error while trying to mount it, but you can put the config in the /etc/fstab file, with all other file systems to mount at system boot. The syntax for the CD mount will be similar to the lines already in this file for the hard disk, I'll let you look around for the correct line to add to this config file

Thanks again Pedro for replying. If it's not useful like you say, then I'm not going to try it. I was just thinking of the same as M$ wins that you can always see at least the cd-drive or the name of a cd when inserted into the drive. Do you know if you can do this with Linux? I thought I seen on linux a cd-rom drive icon that'll say if it has a cd mounted in it, or just the drive icon.

Thank you for all your replies. But the problem is still there. For the person who said to try a different CD, I have done so. I have tried all Linux CDs plus many more. But the problem remains. I have also tried the command line:

[root@localhost Sanj]# ln -s /dev/cdrom /dev/hdc
ln: `/dev/hdc': File exists


root@localhost Sanj]# cat /etc/fstab
LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1
LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
/dev/hda3 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/hdd4 /mnt/zip auto noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0

Could someone please help. I have used the same CD Drive to install Linux.

Thank You again!

This command line is not good!
If you make a:
man ln
you'll see that you have the target (original file) first and the new link name in second parameter, it is the opposite you must do... To create a link called /dev/cdrom to point to /dev/hdc you must do:
ln -s /dev/hdc /dev/cdrom

Why /dev/hdc? It means your CD player is IDE and it is connectd to secondary IDE bus, master port.
/dev/hda -> primary IDE, master
/dev/hdb -> primary IDE, slave
/dev/hdc -> secondary IDE, master
/dev/hdd -> secondary IDE, slave

Why create a link to a device? Because Xine by default is expecting a device called /dev/cdrom or /dev/dvd (don't remmember wich...)

Since you say you've installed linux with CDs, it must be working...
Did you change kernel settings or recompile the kernel? Do you have boot errors in /var/log/messages log file?

The last line means that if you do a:
mount /dev/cdrom
it will mount the CD file system in /mnt/cdrom, so if you do a ls /mnt/cdrom you'll see the files inside the CD.

The last parameters in the line (the last 0 I think) tell you if it must do an automatic mount of the file system at boot time, but as I said before this is not much usefull, as it will only work if you have a CD inside the drive at boot time.

I've seen this kind of problem with SCSI CD drives, because the install disk has drivers to use SCSI CD drives and the default kernel doesn't. Then you have to check what kind of CD drive you have and get the correct drivers. But with a IDE CD drive, they normaly work ok after install.