I am fairly new to Linux although I have played around with several different distro's of Linux my experience is limited to working with WINE to see which Distro's i can get Warcraft running on, checking out the customization, and yadda yadda, right now I am working with openSUSE 10.3 (KDE) and trying to find my USB DVD burner.

Can anyone tell me how I locate my USB DVD burner so I can mount it? I've tried just mounting /dev/dvdrw1 to /mnt/dvdrw1 but that always kicks back a read only error when using a blank dvd. So I'm thinking I might be calling the wrong device when I'm doing it? Not sure, how do I identify what in /dev is actually my usb dvd burner device?

Also would this be the same if I connected the exact same usb dvd burner to a red hat 7 distro?

I have no experience with USB optical drives. But the first time I plug in either a USB flash drive or optical media (in an internal drive), I get a 'what would you like to do' dialog, at which point you can choose something. Also, both types of devices end up getting automatically mounted directly under the /media folder. So, after you insert media into your drive, you might check there. If none of this helps, then make sure that your mount method includes the "rw" option, which means read-write. You *may* also need to go into YaST -> Security and Users -> User Management and add your user account to the "disk" group. But I haven't needed to do that -- the process that mounts removable media under /media always mounts it with my user account as the owner of the mount point with full owner rights to it.

Try yast2 hardware > hardware information if listed or not
After connecting the burner for the first time was it on and did you reboot the system


best of luck

OK I checked Yast2, and it displays a USB CDROM, and when I expanded that (this is under Hardware Information) it comes up was a Multiburner2, which is what type of DVD burner it is. It displayed this as /dev/sr1

So then I went under su in terminal, typed mount /dev/sr1 /mnt/dvdrw

and it kicks back this error message:

mount: you must specify the filesystem type

So then i tried to mount -t iso9660 /dev/sr1 /mnt/dvdrw
and got

mount: block device /dev/sr1 is write-protected, mounting read-only
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sr1,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
(could this be the IDE device where you in fact use
ide-scsi so that sr0 or sda or so is needed?)
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so


I tried putting in a DVD I know has data on it, then did a mount -t iso9660 /dev/sr1 /mnt/dvdrw then checked out the contents of that directory and it has the data from the DVD in it. Although it reports as : mount: block device /dev/sr1 is write-protected, mounting read-only
I suppose in this case thats normal since it is not a burnable dvd.


EDIT:


Ok, so unmounted everything and started over. Put the blank DVD in, opened K3B and can burn to the DVD burner just fine, SO suse is reading the dvd burner. BUT what I have to accomplish is putting this DVD burner at a specific mount point. Here's why, might help explain what im trying to accomplish.

I have a Linux IBM server that has NO built in DVD burner. The designers of our software has writen a script designed to backup files XYZ every night to /mnt/dvdrw

The probelm is.. They did not tell the USB dvd burner to be /mnt/dvdrw , they have a script to loook for regular DVD burner, for it to become /mnt/dvdrw the only problem is there scripts errors out because the dev they are looking for to become /mnt/dvdrw doesnt exist. And so it is up to me to make this USB dvd burner (/dev/sr1) become /mnt/dvdrw

Is you,re usb burner mentioned in /etc/fstab
And if so how is it mentioned
For the cd rom the respective subdirectories are created /media




good luck