No more CD-ROM drive
 

Greetings:

I have apparently lost the use of my CD-ROM drive. This may have coincided when I loaded a MEPIS distribution on a second physical hard drive. I am not certain if this contributed to the problem or not, but the hda device contains SuSE (primary master) the hdb device has the MEPIS distro (primary slave) and the CD-ROM is an ATAPI device controlled as the secondary master.

I checked the jumpers on the CD-ROM drive and they appear correctly configured. The BIOS does not register the CD-ROM in the boot order; there is only the hard drive, floppy drive and the network card available as bootable devices. I have already cleared the CMOS settings (jumper on the motherboard) and restored the settings manually. Is it possible the CD-ROM drive itself has failed?

When I attempt to mount the drive from an icon on the KDE desktop, I get the dreaded "mount: /dev/cdrom is not a valid block device" error dialog. I did a search prior to posting this thread, but none of the existing threads with this reported error seems to help my situation.

One last thing, I did pickup a Knoppix ver. 3.9 CD in a futile effort to further diagnose my problem. Needless to say, without a functioning CD-ROM drive - Knoppix is unusable to me.

This is a (ahem!) "legacy" machine: Compaq Deskpro, 400 MHz Pentium CPU with 192 MB RAM with two loaded ISA slots.

Thanks in advance to anyone whom may offer help.
C-monkey

If BIOS suddenly failed to recognize it then it's fubar. :(
Time to shop for new one.

When you are attempting to mount the CD, do you have a data CD inserted into it? You cannot mount an empty drive, nor can you mount an audio CD.

OTOH if you are attempting to boot from a Knoppix CD, make sure that the CD is listed first in your BIOS boot sequence, and make certain that the data and power cables are securely seated. -- J.W.