I am SO confused! I think this may partly be why I can't listen to CDs...

I can get the SuSE disks to work in my CDROM/CDRecorder (my primary optical drive). But I can't get ANYTHING to register in my DVD drive (the secondary) and whereas I can read from my fd0 drive, I can't write to it. What's going on?

I get this message when I try to mount in Konsole: no /dev/(insert drive name here) in /etc/mtab/ and /etc/fstab/. Weren't they supposed to go there by default? When I boot in verbose mode it seems to recognize the names of my drives (an ASUS CDRW, for example), but if I do a uname -a, it says my hardware is unknown.

I tried to take a looksie in the /etc/mtab/ and /etc/fstab/ directories, but alas, it says there is no such file or directory. Doing a ls of /etc/ reveals they are there.

I am a complete newb (obviously) and I thought I had this part at least, figured out. How do I get my drives to work?

shoe

Are you trying to mount a audio CD? If so you can not mount it. You need to do that with a program like mplayer.

This is only my 2nd day using Knoppix 3.2, so im probably way off, but i think its like this
Open Shell and type this
mkdir /mnt/cdrom
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/cdrom

Hmmm, I WAS trying to mount an audio CD... Thanks. I might try that second suggestion on the floppy...

If it doesn't work, I'll give a holler.

I love Linux (among other reasons) because it shows me what an idiot Bill Gates really thinks I am. Unfortunately, it shows me what an idiot I can be sometimes, too.

shoe

/etc/fstab and /etc/mtab are files. fstab has a list of drives you can mount, and mtab shows the drives already mounted.
If you don't have an entry for the drive in the /etc/fstab file, you have to type in a lot of detail when mounting. Example for floppy: "mount -t vfat /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy"
vfat is the filesystem type, it'll be vfat if it's a windows floppy.
/mnt/floppy is the mount point, it's a folder where you'll find the stuff on the disk. It has to exist before you can mount.

That clears things up, thanks... I got it working.

shoe