Hello,

I have the most weired problem. I have upgraded to a dvd burner, and kept my existing cd burner. Initially there was a symbolic link /dev/cdrecorder to /dev/hdb.

I have created two new symbolic links as follows:
ln -s /dev/hdb /dev/dvdrw -> this is my new dvd
ln -s /dev/hdd /dev/cdrw -> my old cd.

My fstab entries for these devices are as follows
/dev/dvdrw /dvdrw subfs noauto,fs=cdfss,ro,user,procuid,nosuid,nodev,exec,iocharset=utf8 0 0

/dev/cdrw /cdrw subfs noauto,fs=cdfss,ro,user,procuid,nosuid,nodev,exec,iocharset=utf8 0 0

When I installed the dvd I moved the cd to hdd from hdb and the dvd is now hdb.

All this stuff works, but when I reboot my symbolic links (/dev/dvdrw and /dev/cdrw) are gone.

For the life of me I can't understand why:

here is the output of ls:
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 8 2006-12-05 21:07 /dev/dvdrw -> /dev/hdb

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 2006-12-05 20:49 /dev/cdrecorder -> hdb
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 2006-12-05 20:49 /dev/cdrom -> hdb
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 8 2006-12-05 21:07 /dev/cdrw -> /dev/hdd

The /dev/cdrecorder and /dev/cdrom are the old links, which stay put as they should.

The output of ls against hdb and hdd:
brw------- 1 ascjxr disk 3, 64 2006-12-05 15:49 /dev/hdb
brw-r----- 1 root disk 22, 64 2006-12-05 15:49 /dev/hdd

I'm not sure why hdb has my id, but I have tried to change that to root, but again when I reboot it's back to my id.

Any ideas why this is happening and how to permanently fix it. I seem to be able to fix it temporarily, but it doesn't stay across reboots.

Thanks,
Joe.

Hi jxrod2000,

If you use a modern distribution, you don't have the directory /dev fully populated on the root fs. Instead, during boot, it's created a pseudo file system which is mounted on /dev and it is populated on demand. Your links won't be preserved after reboot as this file system exists only in memory.

I can't say the way, but you can change the devfs or udev configuration to create your symlinks when it populates the new fs on start up.

I believe that udev will copy any device file that is saved in /etc/udev/devices/ at bootup.

Create this directory and copy your link files into it.

Thank you dxqcanada and obrigada Osvaldo.

You guys pointed me in the right direction. Since I run Suse, it wasn't as simple as just copying the dev links, but I was able to figure it out.

Joe.

**nevermind**

Excellent!