Before anyone asks, I've spent approx. 2-3 hours looking in several forums, help files, man pages, Google etc. but not found a complete answer yet !

I installed default MDK9.1 on P3 and all was fine. I used KDE and played happily for hours.

Today I tried to access box via SSH and all was OK until I tried to mount a Mandrake CD on my CD-ROM (NOT CDRW )

To cut a long story short I tried all the suggestions e.g. remove supermount thang ! etc. etc.

It would not work on shell via SSH. Kept getting "special device /etc/hdc does not exist".

Original /etc/fstab line :

none /mnt/cdrom supermount dev=/dev/hdc,fs=auto,ro,--,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0

OK, used supermount -i disable and got :

/dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom auto codepage=850,noauto,iocharset=iso8859-15,nodev 0 0

bit more "standard" BUT, and here's the weird bit, there is NO /dev/hdc (or /dev/cdrom) in /dev !!

Finally gave up and decided to try via console and KDE BUT still using a terminal and BINGO ... it worked ???

Also now back on SSH it also works ... BUT it looks like /dev/hdc has now been created ??? How the hell did it do that ?

$ ls -la /dev |grep hdc
lr-xr-xr-x 1 root root 30 Jul 28 13:57 hdc -> ide/host0/bus1/target0/lun0/cd

Also how does this supermount thingy work with the "none" bit at the front ? I can't find any docs on this. man supermount and fstab don't mention the use of none for CDs or floppys, only for "special" filesystems.

Any help appreciated.

ok, you've got no /dev/hdc. so is this device definitely connect to the secondary master IDE channel? what about secondary slave? /dev/hdd. maybe mandrake set up scsi emulation for it, so it might be listed as /dec/scd0 insated of hdc have a look through /proc/ide to see what devices you do actually have.