Hi everyone. i'm a total newbie to linux. just managed to install knoppix to my hd.

After i installed knoppix and run it from my hd, i cannot access my dvd rom which i used it before to install knoppix.

when booting up i can see linux detects my dvd rom as hdb

and i typed "dmesg |grep -i dvd " , i got something like below:

hdb: Compaq DVD-ROM DRN-8080B, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
Vendor: COMPAQ Model: DVD-ROM DRN8080B Rev: 1.14

i guess the system recognises my dvd rom. but i just cannot access it from either:

device:/ DVD (in Konqueror)

when i clicked on the DVD icon, i was told

"mount: special device /dev/dvd does not exist
please check that the disk is entered correctly"

i tried to access the dvd rom from /mnt or /dev but in vain.


Can anyone help me ?

ThanX !

Did you mount the disk?
mount /dev/dvd /mnt/dvd

I tried that but i was told "mount: special device /dev/dvd does not exist".

i have completely no idea :S

Try
mount /dev/hdb /mnt/dvd

i got "error while guessing filesystem type"

i was actually trying to read a CD from my DVD rom.

i then tried mount -t iso9660 /dev/hdb /mnt/dvd and got
"wrong fd type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdb, or too many mounted file systems"

What displays
mount

or

cat /etc/mtab

It maybe that your dvd is already mounted.

If not it also can be that the FS type is not iso9660.
It can be e.g. also UDF.

Try
mount /dev/hdb -t auto /mnt/dvd

thanks for all the replies

i got it working by " mount -t udf /dev/scd0 /mnt"

but i still dont understand why it is so.

CD/DVD can be formated with different Filesystems, although in most cases it's either UDF of ISO9600

if you mount using the auto option, mount can recognize what FS is on the CD or DVD and mount it the right way.
You can not mount an UDF formated disk with iso9660 option and vice versa. UDF and ISO9660 are different filesystems.

Take a look on your /etc/fstab

find there the entry for your cd/dvd and take a look on the column specifying the filesystem.
Change it to auto.
Here, how it looks in my fstab.
/dev/dvd /mnt/dvd auto ro,noauto,exec,user 0 0
(I think in your case you shall replace /dev/dvd with /dev/scd0)
After that you can mount your dvd simply with
mount /mnt/dvd

/dev/scd0 indicates that you have SCSI emulation on for your drive. This
was necessary in 2.4.x kernel in order to write CD+R/RWs.

Your using scsi emulation so you need to point it to /dev/scd0 not /dev/hdb

one more question, do i have to mount the DVD rom drive everytime when i restart the computer or is that the way linux works ?

Removing noauto from /etc/fstab will allow linux to automatically mount the device when your computer starts

Actually there are two ways you can handle mounting:

1) You install the supermounter (submount) and you do not have to take care about mounting
removable media (floppy, CD/DVD, Memory Cards, etc) at all. This is done automatically
by submount.
http://submount.sourceforge.net/

2) The "traditional" way, where you need to mount the DVD *every time* you insert
a DVD/CD in your drive *and* unmount when you would like to eject them.
One exception are Audio-CDs which you can not mount.

Which option you will use depends on your preferences.

Although I think that submount is a nice thing, I prefer the
traditional way, since I have always done it that way :-)))

The noauto option tells Linux not to mount a Filesystem (in this case the DVD)
at boot. The reason why I use this option is because I have configurde my DVD as alternative boot device.
So when booting my Linux from hard drive there isn't any media (CD/DVD)
in the drive, therefore an attempt to mount the DVD during boot will result in an error.