Can't Access CDROM
 

I installed Linux Mandrake 8.1. Everything went smooth. However I know this is probably a simple process just my lack of knowledge of linux I am unable to accomplish it. I put in my cdrom and tried to access the data on the cdroms. Nothing -=(. I went into the dev/ directory and I tried to open cdrom1 and cdrom2 (I have two cdroms) and konquerer popped up asking me what I would like to open cdrom1 with.

So out of curiousity to see if it could even read my cdroms I put in an audio cd and used the kde menu and went under multimedia and found a cdplayer program. I clicked on play and it was playing the audio that was on the cd.

What am I doing wrong? Can you view cd's like the way you could in windows?

I appreciate your time. Thank You.

try

prompt@linux: ~>mount /dev/cdrom1

or, at the kde desktop, right click on a cd icon, and select "Mount"

the "mount" command tells the vfs that there is now a file system available at the cd mount points (/dev/cdrom1 &|| /dev/cdrom2)

without the mounting, the vfs (virtual file system) doesn't know that there's anything there. the reason that the cdplayer works is that it assumes that there's an audio-cd there, and goes ahead on that, but it never truly mounts the drive.

pretty suer there's a 'mount' command on the right click menu for the device on the desktop.

the /dev/ entry is the data about the device, not the contents of the device.

from the command line rnu

mount /mnt/cdrom
OR
mount /dev/cdrom

and that should mount the drive at that location, asuming it already exists, and is right... look at the /etc/fstab file for the exact location of the mountpoints, just don't edit enythign till you understand it better.

once you've finished with it, unmount the drive:

umount /dev/cdrom
OR
umount /mnt/cdrom
make sure you're not in the cd's directory when trying to do this

*evil cackling and suppressed maniacal laughter*

Did you try making BIOS detect your hardware instead of Mandrake?

I had the same problem, and fixed it that way.

you need a woman.. fast.

HA HA! Good one.

Thanks Guys
 

Thanks. All the nfo is appreciated. Tomorrow when I get the chance to play with linux again I will try mounting the cdroms and also check to see if my bios is detecting the hardware. I did let mandrake detect all the hardware during install.

Thanks again.

you guys rock! I got the cdrom drives mounted! I wish though their could be some type of icon on the desktop for kde for the cdrom drives. I had to go to the control center and then go to block devices and right click and mount the drives. but im not complaining. linux rocks. i was able to install some rpm packages i downloaded. next step - figure out how to successfully compile tar.gz files once uncompressed.

once uncompressed...

./configure
make
make install