toshiba cd-rom does not mount cd's on a quantex labtop
 

I recently received an old quantex ts30h laptop with a Toshiba cd-rom drive. The laptop had a copy of Libranet installed on it. I was testing the cd-rom drive and found that it could not mount cd's. The cdrom was set to /dev/hdc. I had this problem before on my regular computer but never fixed it. I figured that the device was incorrect and ran one of the admin utilities and it recognized the cd-rom and installed it under /dev/scd1, i believe. I saved the settings to fstab, and ran mount and got a variety of cd's to mount. So I am sure the cd drive works so I went ahead and reformatted so I could install a newer linux, namely mandrake 9.1. The cd's booted but as it was getting ready to installing it kept popping up the message that the boot medium was not readable. I eventually got Mandrake installed by using a usb cd-rw that my job has and now I am facing the same problem as Libranet had. Linux is saying the cd-rom dev is hdc, but won't mount any cd's. I guess the cd-rom device should be scd1 but I have no idea how to go about changing this in Mandrake. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Jarin Scott

what command are you using to mount the cds??? what error messages do you get???

I use mount /mnt/cdrom and the error message is "mount: I could not determine the filesystem type, and none was specified." The same message appears if I do a mount /dev/hdc.

if your cd-rom is /dev/hdc then to mount a cd:

mount -t iso9660 /dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom

(this assumes that a directory called /mnt/cdrom already exists...)

Tried to run that command and got a message saying "mount" block device is write-protected, mounting read-only" and then "mount: not a directory." If I try as a user I get "mount: pnly root can do that" now what.

try this (as root):

mkdir /mnt/cdrom-toshiba

mount -t iso9660 /dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom-toshiba

what does THAT give you???

Same message as before. Did no good.

hmmm... what kinda cd are you trying to mount??? you can't mount a music cd, for example...

i found signs on the web that this has happened to other folks before (not sure what causes it yet, though...):

http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedor.../msg03130.html

http://linux-user.com/index.php?view=219&

hmmm...

I am trying to mount plain old data cd's. I will look at those links.
Thanks

When installing Mandrake 9.1 on the laptop, the cd could not be found or read. I had this problem on my regular machine when I had a dvd and a cd-rw installed, the cd-rw would not install because it was using the wrong device. The cd-rw was called, I believe hdd. This was when I was dual booting with windows so I did little to get it to work, but when I built my second macine I put the cd-rw in it alone and it worked with no prodding. The cd-rw was renamed to scd1. This is the same thing that happened with the laptop. Again the distro was libranet and the cd was hdc. This device I am sure was wrong for I ran a cd utility on the system and it redetected it as scd1 and it started to work. Is there a way to get mandrake to rescan the cd, to get the right device. I can't use the external cd-rw everytime I need something off a cd, since it is not mine. The external cd-rw was the only way I got Mandrake installed.

Jarin Scott

afaik, devices like /dev/scd0 are for cd writers...

this is because linux (at least version 2.4 and prior) needs to use scsi emulation to get cd writers to write... but you don't use scsi emulation for regular cd-rom drives... so i'm not sure why you would need to have your cd-rom at /dev/scdx...

http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/cdrw.htm

the one you're trying to get to work is just a regular cd-rom (not cd-r/rw), right???

i really don't think your problem is the device address... plus those problems during the install sound kinda creepy... did that drive ever work right at one time (with linux)??? i mean, could it be that the drive just isn't compatible with linux? i ask this because i went to the mandrake website to check the supported cd-roms for 9.2 and there was like ONE toshiba and it was listed as "not supported"...

http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/hard...drom&F_ID=3379

It did work at one time with libranet, but I think the guy said libranet was similar to gentoo.

Jarin Scott

libranet is a debian-based binary distro... gentoo is source-based... they are VERY different...

=)

but anyways, hardware compatibility isn't a "distro" issue, it's a "kernel" issue...

what's the model number of your drive?? it's not the one listed as "not supported" by mandrake, right??

The model number is Xm-1702b. It is not the one "not supported" by mandrake.

Jarin Scott