Hello, I upgraded my system from Mandrake 8.0 to Mandrake 9.1, and now my CDROM seems to have disappeared! Before the upgrade I had:

/dev/cdrom ==> CD ROM
/dev/cdrom2 ==> CD Burner

Now after the upgrade and conversion to the "devfs" device file system, I have:

/dev/cdrom ==> CD Burner (linked to /dev/cdroms/cdrom0, which is in turn linked to something in /dev/scsi.... etc) The burner works fine, but I'd like to do disk-to-disk copy....

And whenever I try to mount /dev/cdrom2 I get "device no longer seems to exist" (or something along those lines..)

I've tried linking /dev/cdrom2 to various "generic" devices I have found in the /dev/ide/... tree as well as to /dev/hdd (which is odd, because I only have one harddrive in the machine) with similar results...

Where did my CDROM go? How can I get it back?

Thanks!

/dev/cdrom and /dev/cdrom2 are actually just symlinks to the actual devices which should show up like /dev/hdc and /dev/hdd, depending on what IDE drive you have them attached to.

If you have your cdrom and burner on the secondary IDE controller, if the cdrom is master and burner is the slave, then they should both be respectively:

cdrom = /dev/hdc
burner = /dev/hdd

Or vice versa...

You can create a symlink with the ln command....

man ln for more details.

Yes, that is how they were in my old system (MDK 8.0 pre-upgrade), but they are not like that now.

/dev/cdrom used to be linked to /dev/hdb and /dev/cdrom2 was linked to /dev/hdc

However, now with the switch to "devfs" and Mandrake 9.1 neither /dev/hdc or /dev/hdb exist anymore, and /dev/cdrom is symlinked to /dev/cdroms/cdrom0 (which is in turn symlinked to something in /dev/scsi...) and /dev/cdrom2 just plain doesn't exist...

/dev/cdrom (the burner in the new system) is working fine, but I can't get the CD ROM to work.

The only hd* devices in my /dev are /dev/hda (my boot drive) and /dev/hdd (but I have no idea what that is)

Creating a /dev/cdrom2 symlink to /dev/hdd accomplishes nothing, I can't mount it (it gives me a bunch of errrors saying the device doesn't exits etc...)

Also, the /de/hda is symlinked to something in the /dev/ide/... tree, and I have explored that tree and found a couple of devices called "generic", I have tried symlinking /dev/cdrom2 to them as well, but nothing works...

BTW, the drive setup I have is:

Hard drive ==> primary master
CD ROM ==> primary slave
Burner ==> secondary master

i dont know alot about devfs(apart from i dont like it) but when your using it you can still use the old device nodes so

mkdir /mnt/dev
mknod /mnt/dev/cdrom b 3 64
chown root:disk /mnt/dev/cdrom
chmod 660 /mnt/dev/cdrom

if the chown fails then instead of disk use whatever group mandrake uses for disks.

the reason you cant put the node in /dev is because it will be removed on each reboot. so /mnt/dev seems a reasonable place. if im right you should now have a /mnr/dev/cdrom device node that points to the primary slave. that you can use.

i suggest if you find out how, use the proper devfs solution but that should work temporarily.

Thanks, I'll try that out.

BTW, what do the parameters for "mknod" do?

i.e. what do the 3 and 64 represent?

in unix systems, devices are identified by 2 numbers, a major and minor number. The major numbers represent a class of device eg major 3 is the primary ide controller, major 22 is the secondary ide controller, major 4 is virtual terminals among other things. The minor number represents the actual device and depends on the major number. there is a list somewhere in the kernel source but i forget what its called. the b means it is a buffered device instead of a character device.

Ok, I tried your advice and created the device file as mentioned with "mknod", then I added this to my fstab:

none /mnt/cdrom2 supermount dev=/mnt/dev/cdrom,fs=iso9660 0 0

But when I try:

mount /mnt/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom2

I get:

mount: /mnt/dev/cdrom is not a valid block device

Also something else weird, I just checked my dmesg, and /dev/hdb does show up there but not in the actual /dev...

First I get:

hdb: HL-DT-ST CD-ROM GCR-8520B, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive

then later on:

SCSI subsystem driver Revision: 1.00
scsi0 : SCSI host adapter emulation for IDE ATAPI devices
Vendor: LG Model: CD-RW CED-8080B Rev: 1.05
Type: CD-ROM ANSI SCSI revision: 02
ide-cd: ignoring drive hdb

then even later:

ide-cd: ignoring drive hdb
hdb: driver not present

What's going on?

Thanks!