I'm not sure how I did this, but I seem to have set my CD-ROM driver to ignore. At least, this is what it says in my hardware browser (in GNOME). My computer runs Red Hat 7.3. The drive worked fine when I got the computer (which came with my job). This is my first linux computer, so I've been exploring it to figure out how to work things and while I try not to change anything, well obviously I did. I would appreciate any advice. on how to change it back.

Phil

Hi

Since the computer came with your job, it may not be possible, but if it is, I would certainly recommend updated to a more recent version of the Red Hat operating system. The commercial version is now Red Hat EL 4, and the Red Hat offshoot for the desktop (or anything else, for that matter) is Fedora Core 5. The version you are using is about 6 years old and is not supported by Red Hat anymore. After Red Hat 9, Red Hat ceased to produce a desktop version and now supports the community driven Fedora Core project.

But, as for your CD rom problem, do two things. First make sure there is an entry for your cd rom in the /etc/fstab file. It should look something like this:

Note that this entry is /media/cdrecorder, which is how the newer versions of Fedora and Red Hat show this device, but in Red Had 7 it should be seen as /dev/cdrom, I believe.

If you find this entry (or something like it), the from a terminal as root type:

If you get no errors, try using a cd in the drive. If you get errors, post them back here to get more help.

Hope this helps

Bob

The driver may be instructed to ignore, it is the correct term. I've never worked with ignoring drives and such but if you search Google for ` linux ignore cdrom ` (do not surround that in quotes), you will find information relevant to your problem.

In the meantime, you may want to try opening up the console (terminal) and, as root (or possibly with sudo, whichever makes sense to you), type ` mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom `, if it says mnt/cdrom doesn't exist, type ` mkdir /mnt/cdrom ` (as root or with sudo) and try the mount command again. I believe the ignore command is used to ignore ATA devices, such as hdb or hdd, things like that.

First off, thanks for the advice.

I tried running the mount command (with several different CDs in the drive) and it tells me "mount: No medium found"

There is a line about the cdrom in my /etc/fstab file. Which looks like this:

LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1
LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
LABEL=/home /home ext3 defaults 1 2
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
/dev/hda5 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/hdd1 /home2 ext3 defaults 1 2

I tried changing the '/mnt/cdrom' to '/dev/cdrom' but I got the same message.

Also, and I kind of doubt it's related, when I take a cd out, it seems pretty hot.

Thanks again.
Phil

/mnt/cdrom is the mount point, /dev/cdrom is the actual cd-rom device. CD's can get pretty hot, that is normal

/dev/cdrom is just a symbolic link to some other access point (cdrom is easier to remember, though). You may want to do some checking, somebody else will have to help out here, and make sure that it is, indeed, pointing to the correct drive with ls -l /dev/cdrom.

Trying various devices such as:

/mnt/hdd
/mnt/hdb
etc.

may shed some light on the problem.

Try this from the command line:

cdrecord scanbus

Note the output of this command. If you get output that looks something like this:

/dev/cdrom 3,0 (name or brand of cdrom)

then you have not damaged or removed anything. I know that certain modules can be instructed to ignore certain drivers in the /etc/modules.d file, but you have not described anything you did to cause that. I believe you would have to intentionally seek to create that circumstance.

Post the output of the above command.

Bob