DVD not working all of a sudden - Suse 10.0
 

Hi,

Today, for some reason, my system has decided not to read from the CD/DVD drive. This was working previously, and I've done the obvious, like resarting the machine.

fstab shows:

linux:~ # cat /etc/fstab
/dev/hdb3 / ext3 acl,user_xattr 1 1
/dev/hdb1 /boot ext2 acl,user_xattr 1 2
/dev/hdb2 swap swap defaults 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs noauto 0 0
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs noauto 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5 0 0
/dev/dvdrecorder /media/dvdrecorder subfs noauto,fs=cdfss,ro,procuid,nosuid,nodev,exec,iocharset=utf8 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy subfs noauto,fs=floppyfss,procuid,nodev,nosuid,sync 0 0
none /subdomain subdomainfs noauto 0 0

When I try to mount /dev/devdrecorder, it won't let me saying the "special device does not exist" :

linux:~ # mount /dev/dvdrecorder /mnt/cd/
mount: special device /dev/dvdrecorder does not exist

Any body have any idea what the hell I'm doing wrong here?

Thanks

Niall.

Take a look in /dev. Do you see dvdrecorder listed? If not, make a symlink to put it there.

On my box, by dvd drive links to /dev/hdc. Assuming yours is the same, as root, give the command: ln -s /dev/hdc /dev/dvdrecorder. If yours should link to something other than /dev/hdc, you'll have to figure out which /dev/xxx to link to.

To get that information, as root, give the command: hwinfo --cdrom (don't worry about the cdrom, it'll show you dvd also). Look for a line Device file: /dev/hdc, or whatever. That'll tell you what to link to.

Actually, from hwinfo...i saw that there was actually a link from dev/hdc to dev/dvdrecorder already - what I needed to do was mount /dev/hdc on /media/dvdrecorder and voila I could see the contents of the CD. Weird how it all of a sudden stopped working. Unlike others, I've had NO problems at all with suse 10, until this one little issue. Block devices seem to have issues with the 2.6 kernel. I had a firewire drive that wouldn't hotplug too. but alls well now - thank you again for the pointer.

Glad it worked out for you but let me make a suggestion for the future. Whenever something seems to stop working there are usually two possibilities, hardware failure and configuration changes. I keep a live CD for another distro around for these occasions. If the device boots fine with the live CD, you know the hardware's OK. This also gives you some working configurations files to compare against those of the native system.