For some reason my cdrom doesnt mount anymore. It worked fine from the get-go, the only reason I can think of is because I created a swapfile yesterday. The swapfile works fine.

The cdrom was working perfectly before I created the swapfile. Here is the error I get when it tries to mount the cdrom on bootup.

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock -on /dev/cdrom, or too many mounted file systems.

I removed the entry in fstab so the swapfile didn't load, thinking that might fix so I could at least copy the file I wanted from the cdrom, rebooted, and it still encountered an error when mounting my cdrom. Also, the floppy isn't mounting either. So turning off the swapfile didn't seem to fix it.

The cdrom and floppy stopped working after I created the swapfile, that is the only explanation I can think of because they worked fine before.

My goal is to get the cdrom and floppy working again and have the swapfile on.

My system is DSLinux, linux formatted ext2, on a P233mhz, 2GB HD, 32megs RAM.

Please do 'ls -l /dev/cdrom'. Perhaps (most likely) it was a symlink that is now pointing to the wrong place (for some unknown reason).

ok i did 'ls -l /dev/cdrom' and heres what it said

lrwxrwrxrwx 1 root root 9 Jul 3 1343 /dev/cdrom -> /dev/scd0

how do I fix it?

Do you have an external or SCSI cd drive?

Please do 'dmesg | grep -i cd'

its a scsi toshiba internal cdrom drive.

i tried

mount /dev/scd0 /mnt/cdrom

it said it was mounting it but said error i must specify the file system type, im not quite sure if that would fix it.

Are you sure the CD inside is good?

yes i'm sure ive tried a couple of different cds to make sure.. ive tried an audio cd and a couple of different data cds.
i tried

mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom

but it says i must specify the filesystem and i dont know what that means i am pretty new to linux.

like mount -r or somthing?

specifically when i

mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom or even mount /dev/sdc0 /mnt/cdrom

/dev/cdrom: Input/output error
mount: block device /dev/cdrom is write-protected, mounting read-only
mounting read only
/dev/cdrom: Input/output error
mount: you must specify the filesystem type

please help. it is driving my batty, i am googling everything i can think of.

Insert a data disk and try the following command as root:
mount -t iso9660 /dev/scd0 /mnt/cdrom

Do you still see input/output errors?

You can not mount audio CDs becasue they do not contain a valid filesystem.

Can you duplicate your exact commands when you created the swapfile?

Typing mount -t iso9660 /dev/scd0 /mnt/cdrom

did finally mount the cd.

after that I was at root@/cdrom: when typing ls , it wouldn't display anyfiles on the cd, neither could i see anything in a gui file viewer. but it was mounting and unmounting, because the eject command ejected the cdrom.

so I rebooted and then mounted the cd and presto I could see the files and work with them again.

mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom a million times finally caught on!!

in reguards to the process I learned to create a swap file this is what I did, I think i did it right because it works. i put the swapfile in /opt

root@opt: dd if=dev/hda1 of=swapfile bs=1024 count=132207

mkswap swapfile
swapon swapfile

then added /opt/swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0 to fstab

Thank you so much for you help! I'll be keeping a close eye on my cdrom and floppy and keep you posted.
Next I'm on to my first time compiling and installing software in Linux. I'm going to try and install xscreensaver.