I am running a new server on an Intel 965 board and cannot mount my Sony CDROM. I have tried the standard commands that I know, as well as some that I have found online, but none of them seem to work.

This may be because the IDE connections are translated as SATA. I had that problem during install, but tricked the kernel using the "linux all-generic-ide" command.

I have a file on a CD that I want to install, and the CD is in the drive. It is a TAR file. How do I verify that the OS can see the drive, and what command I should use to access it?

Thanks.

Check with dmesg wether the cd/dvd-rom has been found.

That lists so many lines that some go off screen. How can I scroll through them?

there are many different ways to do it: here is a couple of examples

or you can just press shift and up arrow or page up on the keyboard and the text will scroll up from the last line of the file

-bhert

you can navigate shift+Page Up/Page down
try linux

Thanks, those work great.

So what should the line look like that recognizes my drive? What am I looking for that will help me know where to mount the CDROM drive from?

You should have something like this :

hda: ATAPI 48X DVD-ROM DVD-R CD-R/RW drive, 2048kB Cache, UDMA(33)


You could try doing: dmesg | grep hda

or hdb / hdc/ hdd .. Whichever connector you plugged it on and wether you set it master / slave.. So let's take mine for example. Which is plugged into my 1st IDE connector on motherboard. (the only one) and is set to Master. So linux made it hda.

so dmesg | grep hda results in:

ide0: BM-DMA at 0xf400-0xf407, BIOS settings: hdaMA, hdbMA
hda: BENQ DVD LS DW1655, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
hda: ATAPI 48X DVD-ROM DVD-R CD-R/RW drive, 2048kB Cache, UDMA(33)

Hope this helps you .