Hello. I'm a Linux newbie who's recently installed Slackware. Although most things are working, there's one problem. One of my CD drives has not been detected. My first CD drive, a CD-RW drive by Lite-on, was detected and works, but my second CD drive, a plain CD-ROM drive by Mitsumi, has not been detected. It does not appear in the /mnt directory with the Lite-on CD-RW drive. Is there anyway I can fix this? If it helps, the model of the drive is Mitsumi CD-ROM FX4821T!A. It's rather strange, as this drive has detected by both Slax and Knoppix when I've used them, but not by Slackware.

if you do (as root) 'dmesg |grep -i cdrom' or 'dmesg|grep -i mitsumi' does anything come up?

it probably does and there should be a file called /dev/hdd, which is the device.

it's probably just that slack hasn't created the proper entry in /etc/fstab and/or hasn't created a mount point for the device.

I followed your instructions and sure enough, /dev/hdd was listed right below /dev/hdc. But how do I mount it and get into /etc/fstab? I tried the mount command and that wouldn't work.

well, to get it into fstab you need to

1) create a mount point e.g /mnt/cdrom2
mkdir /mnt/cdrom2
chmod 777 /mnt/cdrom2

2) edit /etc/fstab - maybe copy the line about hdc, but change the device name and mount point e.g
/dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,ro,user 0 0
/dev/hdd /mnt/cdrom2 iso9660 noauto,ro,user 0 0

something along those lines. the noauto means that it doesnt get mounted at boot time or when you type 'mount -a' (mount all).


note cdrom2 is just an example you can use any name. if its dvd drive still use iso9660.

to mount it manually type

mount -t iso9660 /dev/hdd /mnt/cdrom2

again cdrom2 is only an example - but the directory must exist before you try to mount a cd/dvd drive to it.


if neither of these things work then it really hasn't been detected. you didn't post the output of dmesg or anything so it's hard to say.

hope this helps.

It worked! The Mitsumi CD drive now works in Slackware, after following your steps (though I put "auto" where you put "iso9660", so Slack would determine the best driver itself). Thank you very much for your help.