Please excuse my n00bness, but I'm really at a loss. I have 1 CD/DVD Combo Drive (Compaq brand) and 1 aftermarket CDRW drive (Creative brand). What must be done? What needs to be put in my etc/fstab?

Thanks a lot,
Cam

Try looking in your /dev folder for your cdrom device. It may be like /dev/cdrom1 or something (according to RedHat9, it appears to be something else for Mandrake9). After you find it, try to execute a mount /dev/cdrom1 (or whatever it is) /mnt/cd-folder (or wherever you want to stick it). After you play around with it a little and then figure out how it should be mounted, then you put the arguments into the fstab. If you can mount one CDROM already, just hit mount and it should show you where the existing one is mounted (and therefore give you a clue what to look for!). I'm also a rookie so these directions may be way off, but may be a good starting point.

Can I safely assume you know how to get to a command line and then pull this off under there?

yeah - I have no problem with the command line. When I try
or
its says
so perhaps maybe I do have a problem with the command line: am I forgetting an argument? Is it any different because one of my drives is also a DVD drive, and the other one a burner?

Thanx for the help,
Cam

do a mount -t cdfs (or isofs i think one of those) and then the drive and destination.

See man pages for the mount command. Do you have any entries in the fstab file for the cd devices? Do the directories /mnt/cdrom0 and /mnt/cdrom1 exist?

mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdroms/cdrom0 /mnt/cdrom0 (for data CDs)

perfect - that worked
so how do I edit my fstab? And will these mount points work for burning and for DVDs?

Thanks a lot,
Cam

See man pages for fstab and mount.

/dev/cdroms/cdrom0 /mnt/cdrom0 iso9660 users,noauto,ro,exec,umask=000 0 0

The CD burning software use the actual device for your writer and does not reference the fstab file. Unless you use the latest version of cdrecord you will need to setup SCSI emulation. I am not familar with Gentoo enough to give you exact instructions. Try searching the website for help.

thank you very much! About playing DVDs - will I need ot do some additional configuration for that or not?

Thanks!
Cam

You might have to create a /dev/dvd link that points to your DVD writer.