I have just got a new laptop with no OS and have installed Mandriva Spring. The install goes just fine from the DVD, but then when you run Mandriva it just doesn't see the DVD. It's not in /dev/, control centre doesn't see it either. I've installed Mandriva on laptops plenty of times before and had no issues like this.

Does anyone have any suggestions on what might be wrong and how to fix it?

One thing to mention: if I boot from my Mandriva USB key it recognises the DVD and automounts, so I think it must be an installation problem, not a hardware issue.

Or a driver problem. Look at the /sbin/lspci output to see if the DVD is detected, and at the dmesg output for any error messages. (A dmesg | grep -i "error" is often a good place to start.)

P.S. - This is, in my opinion, more likely to be a Mandriva problem that a hardware problem. You might consider asking the moderator to move this thread to that sub-forum.

P.P.S. - You've neglected to specify the make and model of the DVD device, so specific comments in this sub-forum are not very likely.

Thanks for the reply.

lspci doesn't seem to list any DVD player at all.

The grep of the dmesg just gives

(standard input)

It looks like the DVD is a TSSTcorp SN-S082H, but I could only see this by freezing the boot by pressing the pause button! I can't see any reference to this once I am booted.

Fair comment about the catagory, I wasn't sure which one to put it in really. I could try installing Kubuntu just to see whether that sees it...

There is another possibility. I'll use my expernences with SuSE to illustrate.

In my current installation (SuSE 9.3) my cd/dvd combo drive is /dev/hdc. It the previous installation (SuSE 8.3), SuSE created a symlink /dev/cdrom linked to /dev/hdc for cd functions, and /dev/dvd linked to /dev/hdd for dvd functions. Go figure.

So, since the drive obviously works to install Mandriva, you may have a similar situation at work. Try going into the BIOS to see what the drive is called. Then in Mandriva, set up that device.

try taking a look at /var/log/dmesg to see if the dvd is being seen at startup.

Most likely scenario, I think, is that you are not specifying a driver for the kernel when it starts. This also would account for why it works when started from USB or from a bootable DVD (different menu.lst).

Command line in /boot/grub/menu.lst should specify, for instance, hda=ide-cd (of course, hdx is set to match your configuration, with hda as primary IDE0, hdb as secondary IDE0, hdc as primary IDE1, hdd as secondary IDE1).

For reference, my menu.lst entry for Mandriva 2007.1 is this:

title linux mandriva 2007
kernel (hd0,1)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sdc2 devfs=mount hda=ide-c
d hdb=ide-cd acpi=off resume=/dev/sdd1
initrd (hd0,1)/boot/initrd.img

This system uses SCSI hard drives; hda and hdb are both DVD drives.

BigRig, I don't think that's the issue as there's nothing in /dev that looks like it's a DVD or CD. There's no /dev/hd* or /dev/cd* or /dev/dv*.

Jim, here's the closest entry I can find in the dmesg file:

ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
ICH8M: IDE controller at PCI slot 0000:00:1f.1
ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:00:1f.1[A] -> GSI 19 (level, low) -> IRQ 19
ICH8M: chipset revision 3
ICH8M: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
ide0: BM-DMA at 0x18a0-0x18a7, BIOS settings: hda: pio, hdb: DMA
ide1: BM-DMA at 0x18a8-0x18af, BIOS settings: hdc: pio, hdd: pio
Probing IDE interface ide0...
Probing IDE interface ide1...

Actually, that's odd, and a little like BigRig's maybe as it seems like it's seeing hda and hdc for one device!

If I look at my other (HP) laptop when it gets to this point it recognises both the HDD and the DVD (it's a SATA HDD on this machine).

As for the menu.lst I can't see anything like, but then again I can't on my HP laptop either!

What mine look like are something like this:

title 2.6.17-13
kernel (hd0,0)/vmlinuz BOOT_IMAGE=2.6.17-13 root=/dev/sda5 splash=silent resume=/dev/sda6 vga=791
initrd (hd0,0)/initrd.img

FWIW, when I boot from my USB stick, the dmesg does report it sees the drive as hdb. After the probing IDE interface IDE1 it reports it has found:

hdb: TSSTcorp CDDVD SN-S082H, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive.

This makes me think the BIOS setting is correct.

The stick is a version of Mandriva 2007.1 as well. It's all very odd.

Do you have a utility called hwinfo installed. I find it a bit more informative that harddrake. If you have it installed, try 'hwinfo --cdrom'. It should list the drive, the driver(s) needed, and whether or not the driver is active.

I tried installing hwinfo, if I do hwinfo -cdrom it just says:

oops: don't know what to do with "cdrom"

If I pipe hwinfo to a text file, the only info I can find is this:

>> block.3: cdrom
----- /proc/sys/dev/cdrom/info -----
drive name:
drive speed:
drive # of slots:
Can close tray:
Can open tray:
Can lock tray:
Can change speed:
Can select disk:
Can read multisession:
Can read MCN:
Reports media changed:
Can play audio:
Can write CD-R:
Can write CD-RW:
Can read DVD:
Can write DVD-R:
Can write DVD-RAM:
Can read MRW:
Can write MRW:
Can write RAM:
----- /proc/sys/dev/cdrom/info end -----

Not sure whether that means it can see it, it seems to insinuate it can.

My Mandriva installation runs a KDE desktop. If that's what you're using too, see if you have the KInfoCenter application in the System menu, and, if you do, see what it tells you about the cd/dvd device.

The fact that hwinfo cdrom return nothing suggests, to me, that your DVD has no installed driver.

kinfocenter doesn't have anything in the cdrom bit (the HP laptop gives a load of information just like I found in my hwinfo text file above).

One thing I've just noticed in dmesg is this:

ide0: I/O resource 0x3F6-0x3F6 not free.
ide0: ports already in use, skipping probe
ide1: I/O resource 0x376-0x376 not free.
ide1: ports already in use, skipping probe

Could that be relevant?

I just noticed that you said that hwinfo -cdrom gave you an error message. Was the "-" in front of the "cdrom" what you actually used? I'm not sure, but I think that "cdrom" is supposed to be an argument, not an option, so the "-" would be an unusual syntax.

Ah yes, I did enter that incorrectly! Nevertheless, if I do --cdrom it comes up with no results.

Last night I had some correspondence with Mandriva and have entered a bug report at their request. It looks like it *might* be something to do with "borked" IDE old and PATA recent driver mix. This modern Intel chipset is causing problems I am guessing, although why on earth booting from the USB stick would help seems to suggest otherwise. Maybe it's because there's no Sata drivers used when booting from USB and they are are clashing (he totally guessed).

I've had similar problems with my Zepto laptop (ICH8M chipset, TSSTcorp CDDVDW SN-S082H), and I've actually managed to solve the problem somewhat on my box. To put it short, when not booting directly from the CD/DVD, the IDE controller is probably reset by ACPI which causes the IDE bus to be disabled - and the drivers does not enable the IDE bus themselves.
So my solution is to enable the IDE bus manually prior to loading the module.

Since I figure that the problem is not that uncommon, I've set up a home page for my fix, but apparently I cannot post URL's since this is my first post.