Ok, I feel really stupid for asking this but I havent been able to figure out how to access my dvd or cd Drives. My zip and 3.5 drives show up in the media section, but not the CD or DVD drives. I think I have to mount them but Im not sure how to do that. I dont even know how to find the name of the device. So any help would be great here.
I am running Suse 10.1

mounting seems to be the problem. Your other drivers were probably mounted automatically. we can do this after with your cd and dvd drives once we find them. Are your drives IDE drives? if they were mounting would look like this
mount /dev/hdx /mnt/hdx where x is a,b,c or d. This designates which IDE drive it is. Tell me as much as you can about your system configuration especially IDE setup and harddrive setup

Goto the /media directory. Look at what names are in there. Otherwise, look in the file /etc/fstab and see what the mount points are. You mount a drive with:

mount /dev/hdc /media/cdrom

but, if the drive has an fstab entry you only need one or the other. The mount point is a directory in /media.

It would also help if you could post the contents of your /etc/fstab. That lists the disks that the system is aware of, and where they are mounted too. Most distros mount cd and dvds to something in /media now, but it could be anywhere, and fstab will tell us/you.

Everything tamoneya wrote is tru as well, chances are good your CD or DVD is /dev/hdc or /dev/hdd, but it also could easily be hda or hdb. Trying the command as root will mosut likely mount the master CD or DVD rom drive, probably to something like /media/cdrom, but fstab will tell us for sure.

Peace,
JimBass

[edit] Machine! You speedy trickster![/edit]

/dev/hda2 / reiserfs acl,user_xattr 1 1
/dev/hda3 /home reiserfs acl,user_xattr 1 2
/dev/hda1 swap swap defaults 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs noauto 0 0
debugfs /sys/kernel/debug debugfs noauto 0 0
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs noauto 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy auto noauto,user,sync 0 0

Thats my FSTAB. I can see the problem, no mounts for cd or dvd drives. As for devices showing up in my system/storage media, everything that is in the fstab file shows up but still no cd or dvd. So im sure its a mount issue. I have tryed to mount them but no success. They are both IDE. What I dont understand is that when I turn my machine on with the susedvd in the drive, it ask's whether I want to boot from it or not. But once the systewm is fully booted, I seem to lose all access to either cd or dvd drive

Hmmm, Ok I was doing some research on editing the fstab and I found this site http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/fstab.html It does a real good job explaining what and why. I didnt see anything about how to do it if you have more then 1 media drive though. In my case, I have a dvd/rw and a cd/rw drive. How would I make an entry for both of these drives to be mounted and differentiated?

You simply add 2 lines, one for each device. Make sure they have different mount points though (e.g. "/media/cdrom" and "/media/dvd"). Another thing about mount points is that that the directories must exist before you use them, so if you don't have (for example) a directory called /media/cdrom, then create it with "mkdir /media/cdrom".

Ok, I just tryed to edit the fstab to create those 2 new lines but for some reason the changes I made didnt stay. Is there a specific way to edit the fstab?
Also, where do these new directories need to be at? I assume I can call the new directories /media/cdrw and /media/dvdrw if I choose to do so and I would need to make sure my fstab entries match like this...
/dev/cdrom /media/cdrw
/dev/cdrom /media/dvdrw

of course, thats just the beginning of the new entries, there will be other things as well added to those lines.

Those directories are fine in your fstab (again, just remember you create them if you haven't already). As for the changes not being permanent, make sure you edit the file as root.

Ok, im rather confused now. I got the fstab edited and I did it as root this time LOL anyway, ill post that at the end.
Anyway, when I restarted my machine, I left a cd in the cdrw drive. When the reboot was done, I was able to access the cd but it would not let me eject or unmount the cdrw drive. I put a cd in the dvdrw drive and it read it, opened up a box asking me what I wanted to do, I was able to browse the cd and all, I was able to eject the cd and everything worked fine. So I decided to reboot again to see if I could get the cd out of the cdrw drive. Well, I got it out, but now, when I put a cd in either drive, they wont read them. I have no idea whats goin on lol. Any ideas? Maybe its the fstab. Here it is

/dev/hda2 / reiserfs acl,user_xattr 1 1
/dev/hda3 /home reiserfs acl,user_xattr 1 2
/dev/hda1 swap swap defaults 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs noauto 0 0
debugfs /sys/kernel/debug debugfs noauto 0 0
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs noauto 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy auto noauto,user,sync 0 0
/dev/cdrom /media/cdrw auto rw,auto,user,exec 0 0
/dev/cdrom1 /media/dvdrw auto rw,auto,user,exec 0 0


well, any help would be appreciated. And the entries have been made for the folders also.

Ok, I have been researching this for several hours and i am still unable to figure this out. Im pretty sure it has something to do with the fstab file but I dont know what is wrong. If someone could take a look and see if they can see something I missed I would appreciate it.

When you put a CD in the drive, you still need to mount it. Using "auto" in the options list will only mount it at boot. Also, be aware that with "user" in the list, only the user who mounted the device will be able to unmount (or eject) it. If you use users instead, then if you mount it as one user, another user will also be able to unmount it.

Hmmm, ok. I thought that it could be mounted automatically for all users at all times. Ok, so Ill change the entry from user to users. Is there a specific command for mounting the drive?

"mount /dev/cdrom" should work, since the mount point and stuff are defined in your fstab. You can't really do automatic mounting in Linux. I've heard it's possible, but I think it's quite difficult to get working.

Well, I suppose not being able to auto mount drives is actually a good thing security wise, at least in my limited knowledge of Linux eyes Anyway, does the mount command need to matc the entries in the FSTAB? I would think it does. The reason I ask is because I have 2 drives, a cdrw and a dvdrw, and I would like to have an easy way to know which drive i am mounting. For example
mount /dev/cdrw
or
mount /dev/dvdrw