I have two drives, a cd/rw(/dev/hdc) and a dvd/rw(/dev/hdd). Both show up on the desktop icons. But when I put a disc in the cd drive, which is on the master cable, it doesn't work at all. If I put a disc in the dvd drive I can access it and read/write to it.

I checked the /dev/hdc & hdd and they pointing to the right links, /mnt/cdrom & /mnt/cdrom1. As far as I can tell everything looks good, but the cd-rw doesn't seem to work. Even when I run k3b it only list the dvd drive and won't let me add the cd drive. I'm at work now and can't quite remember the error message.

When I put a cd disc in cdrom(/dev/hdc) I get this error message when I try to access it:

Could not mount device.
The reported error was:
mount: /dev/cdrom is not a valid block device

Even as root and I try to type the mount command I get:

mount: /dev/cdrom is not a valid block device


This is how my /dev/cd* devices are listed.

/dev/cdaudio -> /dev/cdrom
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 8 2005-11-18 08:03 /dev/cdrom -> /dev/hdc
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 8 2005-11-18 08:03 /dev/cdrom1 -> /dev/hdd
brw-rw---- 1 root cdrom 24, 0 2001-04-14 19:44 /dev/cdu535

This is my /etc/fstab listing for cd/dvd drives.

/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom udf,iso9660 noauto,users,dev,ro 0 0
/dev/cdrom1 /mnt/cdrom1 udf,iso9660 noauto,users,dev,ro 0 0

I hope this is not too much info...

Thnx.

you mention master cable do you mean its on a ide wide ribbon and is the other one also an IDE or is one of them a scsi optical drive.

2) well done on what you have attempted so far....what is your distro and version number

3) have you tried to use a kanotix or knoppix cd or dvd in the working drive and then attempting to use the other drive? what does your /var/log/dmesg say about those drives? or /syslog or /messages

4) when you change your bios to boot from cd and try the faulty drive is the bios jumping to it and then any lights......does it work under a different operating system so we can eliminate a loose cable....sometimes when we play with it it is easy to put the connector in not a tight as it should be?

"you mention master cable do you mean its on a ide wide ribbon and is the other one also an IDE or is one of them a scsi optical drive."

Both are on one ide cable as master/slave. cdrom is master.

"what is your distro and version number"

I'm using SimplyMepis ver. 3.3.2, with stock kernel 2.6.12.

If I put a bootable cd in the cd drive and restart the computer, it will boot from the cd drive. I also have Debian Sid installed and both drives seems to work fine. Also with Win XP, both drives work without problems.

I will have to get back with info from /var/log/dmesg.

Thnx for the reply.

Hi,
I have same problem in one machine but not on another one, very strange same version Mepis last release RC2 kernel 2.6.15-1-586tsc

In fact the system at boot creats the nodes dynamically, so in the machine M1, where Cd is detected the device /dev/hdc is created and the mount of the CD is automatically doing,
on the second machine M2 ( which runs correctly with mepis 3.3.1, previous stable), there is no /dev/hdc, in fact there is only nodes for recognized partition in my case /dev/hda, hda1,...hda11, I have 11 partitions.
So I created nodes , mknod /dev/hdc b 3 64 but when I reboot the system remove all an creats its own devices and there is no /dev/hdc !!!!

Another problem with usb-storage,
I installed same version of mepis on exactly same machine ( M1 and M3), in one machine( M1) when I plugged an usb pen, it was detected and an icon was viewing on the screen, on another machine, the pen was detected too, ( I checked that the usb-storage is calling) but no icon on the screen, and there is no possibility toe read or to mount the pen, there is no /dev/sdb* (sda is the hard disk).

When I checked the process, I noticed that in the working case M1, the kio-media and kio_media are called by, I suppose, the usb-storage module, and these lib are loaded, it is not the case in the failed case, these lib are not loaded ( these lib are in both case in /usr/lib/kde3/kio_file*)


The questions are:
1. Where to disable the dynamic mknod, I prefere to create static node for CD, otherwise how to manage it
2. How to start the kio_media and kio_file or there is another solution?



thank you in advance
best regards bela

Hi, The second pb is fixed,

I had to run the udev daemon, which calls the kio_media and kio_file
best regards

fair enough......my /etc/fstab uses this
/dev/hda /mnt/cdrom auto umask=0022,user,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850,noauto,ro,exec,users 0 0

which you could try but right hand click your icon first and see if it points to your device /dev/hdc
and there is nothing stopping you adding a new desk icon and selecting the same device just call it cd3

edit....just found out mepis uses 2 section fstab ...static and dynamic if you change your optical drive to above to test.....put it in the static area and not in the dynamic area pls