I'm a newbie - just loaded redhat today. Trying to open cdrom drive and it says: only root can unmount / dev/ cdrom from /mnt/ cdrom.

Hi !! Just tryinna help, but I'm a newbie too.

Is there a CD in your drive?
Can you open it when no OS is launched, or under Windows (if you have it ).

See you.

vic


Long life to Linux

Ther is a CD in the drive, and it opens when using windoze. This is my first time using Linux, and can't open the cdrom drive to get the CD out. I could try closing and rebooting to my Windoze hDD.

Huggy

Me too a Newbie. This problem usually occurs during a abrupt system shutdown or reboot. Since the file systems, including the hardware exist as "mounted" part of the Linux file tree. If you reboot or shutdown without unmounting for example, the CDROM, it would not usuable.

You might try to reenter the Linux and "poweroff" or shutdown properly in order to let the system unmount the CDROM.

Qu Chen

Hi Qu Chen,
Thank for your reply. I haven't actually shut down yet. I'm not sure what you mean by "poweroff" - I'm really new to this.

Huggy

Try this, login as root (in console) and type
umount /dev/cdrom
after this you should be able to open the cdrom manually

reboot and tell us

You dont really need to reboot to open the cdrom. Just type su in console + your root password. Thn the command i typed in my earlier post.

How did you get the cd into the drive?

Is it data or music?

You could try opening a console (to get the "DOS" like screen that asks for commands) there should either be a icon on the "taskbar" or something on the "start" button menu.

once open, you should have something like "john@localhost.smith ~ or $"

Too this, type su and then enter/return, you should then be asked for the "root password" that you put in when you installed the OS, If I remember correctly, you don't get the password "ghosted" i.e. you don't get ***'s instead of the letters/numbers etc, then return/enter.

the "prompt" should then be something like root@localhost.smith and either # or $ (I can't remember which) then you should try

"unmount /dev/cdrom" or "unmount /mnt/cdrom" or unmount /mnt/dev/cdrom"

one of them should work and just return the # or $ prompt, you should be able to open the drive when it has just gone back to the # or $ prompt

oh, and if my memory is correctly, this is for data cd's only, because you don't "mount" music/audio cd's.

I seem to recall, that if you just boot back into window$ then you end up with an initial boot failure that asks for you to remove the disc and press any key, but then when you go back into the redhat, you might then get questions about "file system integrity checks" and then it takes a while to do the system check. But i don't know whether it would then leave the cdrom "unmounted" or not (I use mandrake not redhat - because I feel that it is a much better "n00b", desktop type distro - and automounts data cd's!)


regards

John

p.s. hope this doesnt sound like "teaching granny too suck eggs!"

Dear BigJohn,

I tried that but it said: "Unmount: command not found"

Huggy

its
umount
and not unmount- like i said in my post

My *great* respect to bigjohn
I also find it useful.

But I think the easist way to solve the problem is to give the system a proper restart.

Hi HuggyBear, if you installed the Linux with Xwindow and Gnome or KDE, you could simply use the sommand $reboot. If you could not use this command, try $shutdown now (I forgot whether this is correct).

Qu Chen

Dear Jatt_Thugs in Toronto,

Hey, thanks - "umount works". Blessings upon you!
Thank you also to the other contributors.

Huggy (in China)

Restart would have solved your problem too but now you know the umount command...eh? You are welcome

Yeah, sorry about that, I ALWAYS manage to get that wrong - and spend lots of time having to retype it into consoles (well that's when it tells me "dont recognise the command unmount") lol.

The commands that I use (when I manage to type them correctly) are taken from O'really's "running linux". I didn't bother with linux in a nutshel as I have found that the "nutshell" series is really helpful at telling you what you can do, but not how to achieve it!

Also, I seem to recall seeing somewhere a list of commands taken from the O'really books posted at the top of one of the forums that you might find helpful.

regards

John