When ever I try to access my floppy and cdrom, it gives me an error that I don't have access rights to those devices. I think it has something to do with the way they were mounted, what should I do?

this is to do with the way you mount them. there is a file in the /etc/ directory called fstab (File System Table) which contains information for the mount command to tell it how to mount things. type su to become root and go to this directory and open the file.

there will be a few lines but the important ones at this point are the ones that should look something like this (but may not, depends on the distro how filesystems are set up).

/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noexec,noauto
/dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noexec,noauto,ro

as i said they may be slightly different, depends on how things are set up (you should of told us your distro).

neway you need to add to these two lines at the end of it (where the noexecs,noauto bit is): user
(alot of writing for such a small change sorry)

this should fix things

Alex

P.S. if it doesn;t just su to root and mount the device.

Yeah it is right.. you need to have su - to mount these devices.

They can be automounted in /etc/fstab or otherwise
to mount floppy -

mount -t msdos /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy (incase of dos formatted floppies) or
mount -t autofs /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy (in case of others)

In the same fashion you can mount your cdrom as ..

mount /mnt/cdrom (if it is already specified in fstab)
or
mount -t iso9660 /dev/hdc1 /mnt/cdrom

That should work. Yeah in few distro's you will find directories 'floppy' and 'cdrom' in the root itself instead of /mnt directory. All you have to do is to specify the correct path!

Pashupathi Srinivasa.