DVD-ROM not recognized
 

Hello,

I am running Mandrake 9.2 and I it will not recognize my DVD-ROM, it keeps saying it is only a CD-ROM. I cannot play movies with TOTEM and I would really like to have this fixed before an upcomming roadtrip.

Please Help very lost newbie
Thanks very much

Pearce:D

Post your /etc/fstab file. Check your /dev directory and see if there is a /dev/dvd in there. /dev/dvd is just a link to the actual drive which is usually designated as /dev/hdx where 'x' corresponds to the drive's location on the ide bus. If there is a /dev/dvd, see where it points. You can usually solve this problem by creating the /dev/dvd link and point it to the correct /dev/hdx corresponding to your dvd drive. You do so by opening a console and running:

$ su
<enter root password>
# ln -s /dev/hdx /dev/dvd

Your fstab file will tell you which "hdx" your dvd drive is on.

hi there

is this ur DVD rom also a cd-writer

becaise i faced a problem where i could not get the cd-write working because it requires
SCSI support in th kernel and u need to append a line in ur bootloader
in lilo as far as i remeber it is

append hdb=ide_scsi

so take this care too

regards
gaurav

Hello, here is my fstab file

/dev/hda5 / ext3 noatime 1 1
none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0
/dev/hda7 /home ext3 noatime 1 2
none /mnt/cdrom supermount dev=/dev/hdc,fs=udf:iso9660,ro,--,iocharset=iso8859-1 0 0
/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows vfat user,exec,dev,suid,rw,uid=501,codepage=850,iocharset=iso8859-1 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda6 swap swap defaults 0 0

my dvd drive is a removable drive on my laptop, I do not have a cd rom that I swap in.

I should probably include the fact that Linux sees my dvd drive as a cd rom, not a dvd drive.

Thanks so much for the help

Open a console and run this:

$ su
<enter root password>
# ln -s /dev/hdc /dev/dvd

That should create your dvd link to your drive which fstab reports as being on /dev/hdc.

Try playing a dvd in totem. It will probably tell you that you don't have the codec installed to play it if the link is working properly. All commercial dvds are encrypted and you need to install a special library to decrypt the dvd which mandrake can't include for legal reasons but is commonly available on the web.
Post back with your results and we can take it from there.