I built this pc a week ago and installed Red Hat 8. All was well except for the floppy drive which I didn't care too much about to begin with.

Yesterday I installed a CDR and the instructions said that it had to be in the Secondary channel with the CDROM as its slave. That's when I realized that I had set up the HD originally in the secondary channel.

I moved HD to primary channel; and installed CDR in secondary with CDROM as its slave.

Now I cannot access CDROM or CDR. When I try I am getting message that they do not exist in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab. If the answer is adding these entries into fstab and mtab, how in the world do I do that?

I have read all morning and am finding no answers.

I thank you in advance for any help you can offer.

First..your CDR doesn't 'HAVE' to be your CDRoms slave...nor viseverse. I built a pc like 5 months ago...and the cdr ended up being the master of the dvd-rom...but that doesn't affect in any bad way the way linux recognizes either, only on which one is the primary one.
The problem is that when you installed Linux, I'am assuming, you had one setup...and now you changed your setup...so now your system is all confused because what used to be in one place is no longer there. What you need to figure out, is to find out in which /dev/hdXX your CD drives are now. And add those to your /etc/fstab
untill then will your installation will recognize them...and well...you can also try re-installing the system so that it will automagically detect which partitions are which drives...but do whatever you feel more comfrotable doing,

zLinuxz,

Thank you.

Regarding optioin one, Find out where they are and add them to /etc/fstab: What is the syntax to add something to fstab and do I also need to add to mtab? (Sorry for what I am sure is a stupid question.)

Regarding option two, reinstalling RedHat 8: I don't think I can do this because I cannot use the CD. If the OS is reinstalled I assume that any programs like LimeWire would be wiped out. Is this correct? I know this is the case with Windows, but maybe Linux has some magic that avoids this? (Hoping against hope here.)

Thanks again. I look forward to your reply.

well, you can check if your cdrom will be recognized by selecting to boot from your CD-rom in the BIOS...
for the /etc/fstab

you just need to edit it with root privileges...then just add the partitions in your fstab and save it...then reboot.