I installed a Sony 32x/10x/40x CD-RW (CRX185E1) in my machine today. I've read that burners work more reliably when set as master. Until now, I've had a second hard drive set as secondary master, and on it was an old ntfs partition as well as my swap space. RH labeled this dev/hdc5 and the mountpoint for the ntfs part was mnt/media.

I switched the disk to slave, and installed the RW as master. When I boot, the BIOS recognizes both the RW and the HD, but as RH loads I get several error messages:
mounting local file systems: failed
something about loading the swap space: failed
mounting other filesystems: failed

Then, when it searches for new hardware, it doesn't find the RW, which I assume is because it isn't looking at the secondary IDE, master for new hardware, but if that's true, why doesn't it notice the new HD attached at secondary, slave?

Is there a config file somewhere I have to edit before this will work or have I just screwed something up?

Okay. After posting this message, I remembered something I read about fstab, so I looked at it, and changed hdc5 to hdd5, and did the same for the swap space and that seems to have fixed the problem.