Hello all, I have what I thought was going to be a relatively simple problem, but one which has become increasingly annoying.

After about six months using KDE i blew away my system and installed Fedora Core 3 (from CD), with X and enlightenment as my window manager. No problem,

Unfortunately when I went to execute:

# mount /dev/cdwriter /media/cdrecorder

I discovered that my CDROM is not listed at all under /dev

I have never had this problem before and have always been able to simply mount up my CDROM whenever I needed it. Now i'm helpless. I discovered this problem when I went to run grip which gave me the error: "unable to initialize /dev/cdrom"

Any suggestions will be tremendously appreciated

Try using /dev/hda, /dev/hdb, /dev/hdc, /dev/hdd (for IDE).
Also if you are using scsi emulation (maybe it was enabled automatically) try /dev/scd0, /dev/scd1 etc.

If you like the old way, make a symlink. For example, if you find that your cdrom is /dev/hdc you'd do "ln -s /dev/hdc /dev/cdrom". This is probably how it was set up before.

Hey thanks so much for your reply,

Well, i thought of that as well (considering one of my old systems has a cdrom mounted at /dev/hdc but here is the error I get when i try to mount /dev/hdc (which does exist)

[CODE][root@localhost /]# mount /dev/hdc /media/cdrecorder/
/dev/hdc: Input/output error
mount: block device /dev/hdc is write-protected, mounting read-only
/dev/hdc: Input/output error
mount: /dev/hdc: can't read superblock

This is so baffling b/c i have reliably used this system for years now, and have had FC3, Suse, and mangers such as Gnome, KDE, Fluxbox, and others work without any trouble. The CDROM was used to install the software without troubles and I even booted into my windows partition ( used stricly for gaming, ahem
) and it worked perfectly in there as well.

Is there any kind of volume management that might now have been enabled since I only installed the basic X Package and then installed Enlightenment from source? just pulling at string here, but I figured its better than my hair. Thanks again

Okay, I have made some considerble progress, i see the light at the end of the tunnel, but can't quite seem to figure out how to get there.

First of all I was trying to mount an Audio CD (which I have come to realize was part of my problem, apparently you can't do that.. )

Secondly, whenever I launched Grip I got the error "unable to initialize: /dev/cdrom" I thought this meant that my CDROM was located at /dev/cdrom (as it has been for all my other installations)

Thanks to your good advise I realized that my system is looking at /dev/hdc and that I CAN successfully mount CDROM's to /dev/cdrecorder, problem 1 solved, THANK YOU SO MUCH!

Second Problem: I am still attempting to get grip (which is being launched as User) to initialzie the CDROM, however, when I launch grip as Root it is able to look at /dev/cdrom (i made a sym link) and is able to rip away. When i launch as user I realize it doesn't have the permissions to access the device. What files to i need to change the permission on so that any old User can access the device (or sym linked device) ? Thanks again

.....

If you are mounting using /dev/cdrom, as root change the permissions on the device:
chmod go+rwx /dev/cdrom
or on whichever device is actually being used. This gives all users permissions!

Thanks, those permissions settings totally fix the problem!

Only one small issue remains. When I reboot the system I lose the sym link to /dev/cdrom and also the permissions which allow Users to access it. Is there anyway I can permenantly set something so that after I reboot the system Users are still able to access the cdrom? Or at least set a permanent sym link from /dev/hdc to /dev/cdrom?

Sure, there is.
You can put that command in /etc/rc.d/rc.local as the last line and it will be in effect after reboot!