Problems with Debian Etch installation on HP dv6915nr
 

Hello Everybody, pleasure to be here :)

Ok, I have just installed Debian Etch on my HP dv6915nr lappy using the cd-rom drive. Installation went relatively smooth, it couldn't find my ethernet card nor the driver for it, so I figured i'd install it later. Also X wouldn't start, but with some research i set up the vesa driver for the video card and will install nVidia later.

Now, seeing how my wireless card isn't recognized by default (Intel Pro/Wireless 3945) and my ethernet card driver missing I can not access internet. I wanted to use th CD-ROM drive with the network card drivers i downloaded, but here's where the problem is at! I have no device within /dev/ that would represent my cd-rom drive.

Majority of files are loopX and ramX and ttyXX and stuff. The only files of substance are sda, sda1, sda2, and sda5. During partitioning i remembered sda1 is my primary partition, and sda5 is the swap partition. Mounting sda and sda2 as cdrom fails.

When i mount sda:

thorax:/home/thorax# mount -t iso9660 /dev/sda /cdrom
mount: /dev/sda already mounted or /cdrom busy

thorax:/home/thorax# mount -t iso9660 /dev/sda /cdrom
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda2,
missing codepage or other error
(aren't you trying to mount an extended partition,
instead of some logical partition inside?)
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so


I got it, so i ran dmesg but the output is so numerous i don't know what to look for.

Please help me get my cdrom to work!

Thanks in advance,
and sorry for a heavily bloated message.

Tim

mounting sda and sda2 just wont do, you said it yourself sda1 sda5 etc is your hard drive, theyre part of sda, and sda2 well that is still your hard drive, so what you've been trying to do is to mount your hard drive as cdrom, that just wont do.

Try just to insert a cd to your cd rom, and wait for just 20 seconds or something it should be mounted, since etch does that automatically, try browsing /media/cdrom or /mnt/cdrom.

If you must manually mount then its probably /dev/scd

I don't have the /dev/scd file, and the CD (etch install disk) has been in the drive all morning and nothing's happening :(

EDIT: I tried to do eject -v, and it tells me how it investigated from link to link and ends up at /dev/hda, but it tells me that it tried to use /dev/hda as a device name, but is "no block device". Unable to open device for: 'cdrom'. and nothing happened to the drive itself (not ejected)

EDIT: Thanks to a former active debian mailing list participant (Shaun) the issue got solved. It turns out udev hid the hda device in the /dev/.static/dev/ directory, took us (him) half hour to figure it out on the ICQ channel... but now the problem is solved :)

Any information regarding how exactly this issue was solved...??

yes.
udev automatically creates devices as it thinks they're needed, i did a pidof udevd to see if it was currently running, got the id of the process which means it was. Then i looked into the device that debian was using in the past (during the install) and that led me to look into /dev/.static/dev/ide, and once i file -s'd it the cdrom spun and gave me info about the filesystem, so i found the device. Whatever the reason was for etch discarding it into the useless list (don't know what udev is smoking but..) but the ide device was never located directly under /dev which made it very difficult to find it.

i ran a MAKEDEV ide and it should have recreated all the ide devices but it didn't (in reality it did, right in the home/userName directory, which i didn't discover until later, which is another alternative solution).

It was really confusing and i relied havily on the knowledge of another very helpful and friendly linux guru. I think thats what really makes this community so valuable, is that people here aren't afraid of helping others and passing their knowledge around.

Thanks a lot, I will be back with millions of other questions :)