A rather simple problem that I cannot for love or money think of how to ask succinctly through a search engine.
Apologies for that I suppose it has been posted here before. anyway ..

I have an internal CD/DVD rom drive that I have running as ide-scsi from lilo.
I have an external HP 8200e USB cd writer, also recognized as scsi.

Now, I always have /dev/cdrom, /dev/cdrom0 and /dev/cdrom1 upon booting. I've appended the line "modprobe sg" to the end of /etc/rc.d/rc.local to create the appropriate sg? files. Fstab supplies directions as to where the OS (Mandrake 9.0) is to supermount these devices, namely, /mnt/cdrom and /mnt/cdrw.

The trouble comes when, depending how the machine seems to feel upon a reboot, that /mnt/cdrom will be the internal IDE cdrom drive OR that /mnt/cdrom will be the external USB cd writer.

lilo.conf
----------------------------------------------------------
boot=/dev/hda
map=/boot/map
vga=normal
default=linux
keytable=/boot/us.klt
prompt
nowarn
timeout=100
message=/boot/message
menu-scheme=wb:bw:wb:bw
ignore-table
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label=linux
root=/dev/hda5
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append="hdc=ide-scsi quiet devfs=mount"
vga=788
read-only
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label=linux-nonfb
root=/dev/hda5
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append="devfs=mount"
read-only
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label=failsafe
root=/dev/hda5
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append="failsafe devfs=nomount"
read-only
other=/dev/hda1
label=win
table=/dev/hda
other=/dev/fd0
label=floppy
unsafe
----------------------------------------------------------

In spite of the fact I do not know how to ask "What is Wrong?" succinctly, I'm willing to bet that several of you out there have come across this problem? What to do?

Thank you very much for your time. First time caller, long time listener.

Cybervyk

Sorry, does not seem to want to post fstab, also does not want to acknowledge tabs or spaces in lilo.conf.

fstab
----------------------------------------------------------
/dev/hda5 / ext3 defaults 1 1
none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0
none /mnt/cdrom supermount dev=/dev/scd0,fs=auto,ro,--,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0
none /mnt/cdrw supermount dev=/dev/scd1,fs=auto,ro,--,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0
none /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=auto,--,iocharset=iso8859-1,sync,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0
/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows vfat iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda6 swap swap defaults 0 0
----------------------------------------------------------

to post as it is in your files, you can use the code feature. Without spaces next to the words, place the files between the 2 opening and closing brackets:
[ code ] Place the stuff here [ /code ]

Remove the spaces between the brackets and the code and that will help keep the format proper.

BTW, welcome to LQ

Onto your problem... Mandrake uses DevFS. That's great, it's fine and dandy, and some people love it. Anyway, the /mnt/cdrom is only a mount point for the media you are inserting. It can be /mnt/somewhere/anywhere/something/anything/and/so/on If you really wanted it to be. My point is that you can mount your media anywhere you want, it's the device that is changing. I can see at least 1 problem, you are getting "scsi emulation" from /dev/hdc which is more than likely your internal drive, from lilo.conf. The other is probably getting mounted as an actual scsi drive since it's an external USB drive.

Now with that mouthful said, I really am not too sure on how you'd fix it to "force" the device each time to be the same. You could try re-arranging your append line in lilo to have DevFS mount first:
from append="hdc=ide-scsi quiet devfs=mount" to append="devfs=mount quiet hdc=ide-scsi"
But I am not sure if that'd change anything.

It's all I can come up with right now, and might be worth a shot

Cool

MasterC, thank you very much. I greatly appreciate the warm welcome and the prompt reply. Thank you as well for the code tip, it will prove handy in the future.
I have made the suggested change to lilo.conf.
I'll thank you early again for the help and I'll let you know after a couple reboots whether it seems effective or not.
Please, let me know if you have any other thoughts.

Appreciative

Cybervyk