Trying to get to grips with Linux and have Red Hat 9 recently installed with all updates. Now my CDROM is not being recognised. Among the start up messages I am seeing the following immediately after the <<Checking for new hardware>> section:

<<Updating /etc/fstab cannot stat /dev/cdrom No such directory.>>


Once the GUI is up, the hardware browser is showing the CDROM as being present, but I can't get at it.

Please can someone expalin what I have got wrong and point me how to sort the problem out.

Many thanks.

Perhaps the symlink is missing (/dev/cdrom only points to your cd device) - can you post the output of:
dmesg | grep "^hd"

You should get something like:
hdc: ATAPI 40X CD-ROM drive, 2048kB Cache

In that case your cd drive is "hdc" - so you can create the symlink:
ln -s /dev/hdc /dev/cdrom

David,
Many thanks for coming back to me. No luck with the missing symlink. Have since reinstalled the whole thing and yet again had the problem. Decided to take drastic action (nothing to lose!) and went into /etc/fstab with the editor. Saw two entries referring to CDROM so deleted both and rebooted the system. Surprise, suprise, all was well. Then, after a couple of shutdowns, had the same problem so repeated the editing once more, and bingo - all was back to normal. I have no idea why this happened....
So now the CDROM is present, but I've since disabled the floppy as the system wanted to keep trying to read it for some reason (on, off, on , off etc)
Anyway, I'll reinstall all the updates then see what happens when I re-enable the floppy......
JonnyL