Mounting SATA Optical Drive

rshepard · 11-04-2007, 06:15 PM

My SCSI cd-rw died and I replaced it with a Samsung SATA drive that reads/writes DVD and CD in various flavors. (It doesn't make the morning coffee, but that's about the only limitation.) I had to go SATA because I could not place another IDE drive sufficiently close to the hard drive to use the slave connector.

This new drive is connected to the SATA 3 port on the ASUS motherboard. However, I cannot determine how the kernel sees it. It is not seen as /dev/sda through g, nor as /dev/sd0 through 9.

Does anyone know how a SATA optical drive is assigned to a device? This host currently runs Slackware-11.0, and will be upgraded to -12.0 when I get this hardware issue resolved.

TIA,

Rich

[GOD]Anck · 11-04-2007, 06:58 PM

Try /dev/sr0, I've found it there on some pc's.

If that's not it, look for it in /var/log/dmesg, it should be mentioned there.

(/dev/cdrom usually links to /dev/sr0 as well).

rshepard · 11-05-2007, 08:38 AM

I had looked in dmesg and /var/log/messages before posting, and found nothing.

There is no /dev/sr0 here. Perhaps I need to upgrade to -12.0 in order to have the drive seen? Might the distribution version be an issue?

Thanks,

Rich

H_TeXMeX_H · 11-05-2007, 11:52 AM

What kernel are you running ? Does it have SATA and SCSI support ? Have you tried a 2.6.x kernel ... they tend to have better SATA and SCSI support.

rshepard · 11-05-2007, 04:43 PM

Kernel 2.6.19.2. I know it has SCSI as a module because my tape drive and the former CD-RW are on a SCSI bus. I did not explicitly enable SATA.

Rich

H_TeXMeX_H · 11-06-2007, 03:16 AM

Then you must ... I mean how else can you use a SATA drive without SATA support for it in the kernel ?

duryodhan · 11-06-2007, 08:00 AM

I also wanted to suggest that you could try out the hugesmp.s/huge.s from teh install CD / DVD. If both of them don't detect the drive then its probably a h/w problem.

rshepard · 11-08-2007, 08:02 AM

Germane to the last two comments:

First, I did not build in SATA support with the current kernel because I had no SATA devices and had no plans on getting any. Second, I'll use the new kernel when I upgrade the system.

Since lack of the driver is the reason the drive is not seen, I'll wait until I have the time to upgrade this system, and take advantage of HAL and a compatible configuration to use that drive.

Thanks to all of you,

Rich

H_TeXMeX_H · 11-08-2007, 09:46 AM

No problem, tell us if it works when you get to it ...