Viewing my CD ROM drive
 

I have just reinstalled linux mandrake 9.1 and am using it under kde 3.1., i am having difficulites locating my cdrom drive. I mount it in mandrake control centre nothing happens. I even go an icon but it couldnt locate the drive. Can someone help me please?

Do you mean can't locate as in it doesn't show up at all? Or you can't open the drive? I ask only because you'll get an error if you don't have a CD in the drive and you try to access it.

This is a standard internal IDE drive, right? Not SCSI or some exotic external thing? Is it detected by the BIOS when the computer boots up? If not you have a hardware problem, not a linux problem.

If it is detected you can open a console and try:

$ for i in a b c d ; do cat /proc/ide/hd$i/model ; done

(don't need to be root on my system anyway) to see if it's listed. If it is then maybe you have a configuration problem and you can ask for more specific help.

Yes, I think thats it, I have to keep mounting and unmounting it but before I reinstalled Mandrake it did it automatically and i can only mount it if a disk is in the drive??? Is there any way of getting it like I had before so it does it all for me?

You need to make sure that you have a CD-ROM entry in /etc/fstab

If you want the CD-ROM to auto-mount, you can use the autofs service.
Take a look at the Automount HowTO. :study:
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Automount.html

You can check the current status of autofs by typing:

Why don't you post the contents of your /etc/fstab file? Then perhaps some Mandrake user can compare it with their own. This file controls how disks are mounted and unmounted.

Maybe also tell us what the output of 'ls -l /dev/cdrom' is.