I just noticed that you've got a dvd drive as well as a cdrom drive. The dvd drive is mapped to be mounted at /dvd. You should make sure which drive you've put the CD in. Of course the dvd drive can read the CD, but if you're trying to mount using /cdrom on the dvd drive it won't work.

I'll leave you in makuyl's capable hands for now; it's about time I headed off.

I'd like to say again that Ubuntu would make an excellent distribution for you to start out on. Very much easier to start off on than Debian or even, in my opinion, Knoppix. For kicks I tried it out on my wife's laptop, did a parallel install to WinXP, and it installed and runs beautifully.

cheers

hdd: CD-RW BCE1610IM, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
hdd: ATAPI 40X CD-ROM CD-R/RW drive, 2048kB Cache
Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.20
Unable to identify CD-ROM format.

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 8 Nov 20 22:26 /dev/cdrom -> /dev/hdd

So far so good, maybe the CD isn't readable by the system. (This can happen even if the CD is good if a compatible file system wasn't used during burning, although ISO 9660 is standard.)

Even if it can't be read (I'm not sure of this yet), you can still mount the floppies to get the original files.

I'll check in tomorrow...

I also tried cdrecord and it told me it was a modified cdrecord working on a newer kernel and that it had issues

I've been thinking of downloading the Debian floppies and internet installing. I might get better CD ROM recognition. That's if I can get my floppy drive to work...

Although it would be nice to think I hadn't wasted the ISO downloading time.

I'll download the floppy images anyway and see what you think tomorrow.

Thanks for your help

Karl

With this line you have in fstab :/dev/fd0 /floppy vfat defaults,user,noauto,showexec,umask=022 0 0
I would change user to users and check if /floppy exists. Then it's just a matter of "mount /floppy"

OTOH, why not try debian itself. Better than knoppix on a hd anyway http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/HD_Insta...g_not_to_do_it

For cdrecording I usually use a script:
~$ ls -l $(which burn)
-rwxr-x--- 1 root cdrom 111 May 3 2005 /usr/local/bin/burn
~$ cat /usr/local/bin/burn
#!/bin/sh
cdrecord dev=/dev/hdc driveropts=burnfree,noforcespeed fs=14M speed=12 -dao -eject -overburn -v "$1"

When I burn an iso I just type "burn /path/to/file.iso".