All of a sudden, when I started my computer one day, during the boot, it said that it couldn't stat /dev/cdrom1. It will still boot to the cdrom drive which leads me to believe that it is just an issue with linux. Probably when I upgraded the kernel. I'm currently running kernel version 2.4.20-27.9 on red hat linux 9.0. I have a pentium 3 850 MHz with 512 MB of pc133 RAM, I have 2 hard drives on my Primary IDE cable, the first is a 30 GB Maxtor 7200 RPM hard drive and the other is an 80 GB Maxtor 7200 RPM hard drive. The 30 GB one is the master, but I have my /boot and / on my 80 GB hard drive. On my secondary IDE cable, I have my TDK 24x10x40 CD-burner as the master, and my off-brand DVD-ROM drive as the slave.

When I first installed Red Hat, everything worked the way that it was supposed to and I was able to mount/unmount anything from my cd-burner, but ever since a little while a go, whenever I would start my computer, when it was saying that it was checking for new hardware, it would say "cannot stat /dev/cdrom1" and I can't access anything that I put into my burner. The odd thing is that I can boot from that cd-rom drive and everything, its just that I'm unable to do anything with it once I'm in linux.

I'm mystified as to where to look for help with this problem.... Thanks for any help provided.

-Jalsk

Could be a number of things. First thing that I'd try to do is to test using the 'real' names. Your secondary chain probably has /dev/hdc as master, /dev/hdd as slave.

Put a CD in the offending drive and try:
mount -tiso9660 /dev/hdc /mnt

If you are successful, you should get a message like:
mount: block device /dev/hdd is write-protected, mounting read-only

If you get an error, you may not have the drive set up properly. Please note that CD writers tend to use the ide-scsi mode so they will NOT behave like a normal drive!

Hope this points you in the right direction.

I tried to mount it like you said and it didn't work....
it said:
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdc, or too many mounted file systems (could this be the IDE device where in fact you use ide-scsi so that sr0 or sda or so is needed?)

Thanks for the help...

-Jalsk

P.S. - and another thing is that it would work before, and it just stopped working.

The message that you're getting is the same that I get if I try to mount my CD writer in the "normal" way - this is because it is using ide-scsi mode.

For ide-scsi to work, there are bits that need to be compiled into the kernel - your new kernel may be lacking this support.. You also need something in the boot loader configuration to tell it that the drive in question is supposed to work as ide-scsi.

I remember having to set this all up, I just can't remember how! I'd suggest that you do a Google search: <http://www.google.com/search?q=cdrecord+ide-scsi+howto> - there are a few articles explaining how to get this working properly.

Good luck!

Thanks for the help, I finally got it working again.

-Jalsk