Can not access files on a data DVD
 

Hello,

I burnt a data DVD+RW on my windows laptop. I am trying to access these files from my linux desktop (Fedora 3? Athlon64). The DVD mounts and the files are listed by ls but I can not access them. Attempting to copy them results in "cannot stat *". Using ls -l the owner and permissions for the files appear as ?. The files are highlighted red for some reason.

I originally asked about this a couple of weeks back on the software forum (I think now that this forum is more appropriate). Someone kindly told me to check the file permissions with ls -l, I did this and mysteriously that one time I was able to access the files. But since then I have never got the DVDs to work again.

Bemused,
Chris

I've never seen file permissions show a ? before. The first thing I would try is copying the files as root, this should alleviate any permission problems. After that, when the drive is mounted look at the entry in /etc/mtab and see what file type & options were used to mount it. I've never tried to access a windows DVD before, so I don't know what a proper mtab entry should look like, but you could compare it to another DVD or someone else's mtab entry.

I can not access the files as root either. The entry in mtab is:

/dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom udf ro,nosuid,nodev,user=chris 0 0

means nothing to me!

Thanks,
Chris

The mtab entry looks normal to me. The man pages for mount and/or fstab will have detailed information on what all the options mean. When you do an ls -l, are the file size and time stamp reporting properly? Have you tried to copy them from both a command prompt as well as from whatever file manager you are using? Finally, can you open any of the files with a text editor (as root)? If the file sizes report as 0 bytes, I would guess you have a corrupted DVD. If the size is fine but you can't open them or copy them, and it is not a permissions problem, then I don't know what else to check. The fact that it mounted properly means that the kernel recognized the file system type, so it doesn't sound like a compatibility problem to me. Have you had problems with other DVDs, or is it just this one?

Thanks for replying smannell,

I apologise for not posting back earlier but I missed your post until just now. I actually solved the problem by examining the mount man page as you suggested. For some unknown reason, may be the large files on the disk?, the disk is read properly when mounted as type iso9660 but not udf, so mounting with the command:

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

fixed my problem. Hope this may help another newbie.

Chris