I have an athlon motherboard dualbooting rh 8.0 and win xp. All is fine in xp.
In rh 8 however I have several outstanding issues with which I could do with some advice.
The most important currently is that my dvd is not being read. It is a combo device and when a disk is put in it spins up leds flash etc, but the system does nothing with the disk. I get a lot of my software from dvd and need this working.

If I put a cd in the drive all is ok.

fstab looks like this..........
LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1
LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
LABEL=/home /home ext3 defaults 1 2
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
LABEL=/usr /usr ext3 defaults 1 2
LABEL=/var /var ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/hdb8 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/cdrom1 /mnt/cdrom1 iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0
..............................
the cdrom is at /dev/hdd where I would expect it be
the dvd is at /dev/scd0 which I suppose might also be correct.
So the 1st question is why does it not read dvd's but it will read cd's.

Well what or how are you trying to read these DVD's ? Are they data cd's or actual movies ? You need a program like mplayer ( highly recommended ) to play movie DVD's.

More details please, cause if your trying to mount a DVD media disk, that isn't gonna fly.

these are always computer magazine dvd's, I use them to try out new stuff, but also to quickly get at upgrades, utils etc,

Are you even trying to mount them? Maybe the cd's will automount, however the dvd's won't (just a thought, not a fact). Try mounting them with:
mount -t iso9660 /dev/hdd /mnt/cdrom

When you have these DVD's mounted and workin in win, try right clicking and choosing properties on the drive itself. Look at the filesystem entry, check to see if it has is09660 listed as the filesystem, if not, take note of what it says and post it here, also try mounting using that filesystem.

Cool

progress

It turns out that I get dvd's from 3 pc magazines.
2 use the udf system, I have set my fstab to mount the udf filesystem and after manually mounting them I can now read them.
The other , and wouldn't you beleive it, most important magazine (Linux Format) is using the cdfs filesytem. My system says that is not supported. So how do I read the udf disks. I suspect I'm going to have to do some magic with the kernel here.

Cool, so you've got 2 taken care Now for the cdfs, here's a link to a project you may be interested in (I'm at work and cannot read about it):
http://freshmeat.net/projects/cdfs/?topic_id=118%2C142

And you may want to read this:
http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/linux/linu...1-10/0250.html

Cool

I,ve had a quick look at it and am printing it as we speak to digest later.
However of course now when I put a normal cd into the drive, they aren't read. is it possible to set the system up to raed IS)9660 and udf .

I haven't even dared to think what will happen when I try to write with this drive, (did I mention it was a dvd/cdrw combo drive).

BTW As I stated at the start of this thread I am currently dual booting xp and rh8.0, but can't see a windows mnt. My version of XP was loaded as fat32, does linux handle this, I know it does vfat. I have put a windows directory in the /mnt folder but of course I wont be able to see the xp stuff If I can't mount it.
Thanks for your help so far by the way.

You can try changing the filesystem to "auto". If it does a decent job guessing the filesystem then you are in luck, however I'd say you are probably going to either want to make a seperate entry for the DVD's. Something like:
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 defaults 0 0
/dev/dvd /mnt/dvd udf defaults 0 0
And then just make sure both of the mount points exist, and both of the /dev actually point to your device. Then to mount (depending in the media) you:
mount /mnt/dvd OR
mount /mnt/cdrom
Don't be, it will go nice and smooth as long as you have the scsi emulation going... A search will reveal more on that.
Not sure I quite follow you on this one. You have XP, it's living on a fat32 filesystem. Find which device it's living on with:
fdisk -l
Then mount the device wherever you'd like after modprobing the filesystem:
modprobe vfat
Then mount with:
mount -t vfat /dev/hdX /mnt/wherever
If you want that to always mount on bootup try adding this to your /etc/fstab:
/dev/hdX /mnt/wherever vfat users,owner,umask=022 0 0

adjusting each entry to your needs/desires. To find out more information about the options section (usually contains 'defaults') see man mount.

Cool

thanks for that.
I had just got the dvd going again doing just as you suggest using auto suggested to me by someone else, but thanks for the rest of the post will try it all tommorrow.
I'm getting there