OK, this is pissing me off to no end. I've had this same problem in the past on a RedHat box and I couldn't get an answer so I had no choice but to re-install. Heres the deal......

When I try to mount my CDRom (mount /dev/cdrom) I get errors stating that /dev/cdrom doesn't exist. So I asked a friend who "supposedly" knows Linux and he told me to remove the symbolic link (rm -f /dev/scd0). Now I get an error message stating that the special device file does not exist. The /dev/cdrom file is symbolically linked to /dev/scd0.....is this normal? I don't know why my cdrom stopped mounting. It worked fine before I updated my kernel. Is there a way to fix this problem?? I sure would hate to have to re-install (again) because Linux seems uncapable of managing my devices properly. BTW, this is a server i'm setting up so I didn't install a GUI. It's all command line. Any help is greatly appreciated.

If everything worked well until you rebuilt the kernel then it suggests you missed out SCSI CD-ROM support or something else it depends on, or some of your modules to give you the support are not loading. Check your kernel config again... once the kernel is sorted out you will still need to recreate the special device that your friend told you to delete - bad move! The /dev/cdrom symlink is normally there so that you don't have to remember which device your CD-ROM is, and provide a little abstraction - some people argue that its a bad idea to use symlinks, but I've never had problems. To create the special file use the following in the /dev/ directory I can't say I've ever needed to use mknod but according to the man page the above code should work.

cheers

Jamie...

The kernel is probablly the problem... I just had to redue one of mine to support scsi emulation... my burn software stuck it's nose up at my drives... Turns out when I recompiled my kernel I turned off scsi emulation... ya.. stupid me...

Edit the kernel.. load up everything that has to do with the cdroms and recompile! Then if you wanna be really clean, take them back out one at a time until the problem reoccures...

eh.. another idea.. check your /etc/fstab and make sure it is correct... it probablly is or you would have had a message saying it wasn't.. but it never hurts to check