My Mandrake 10.1 works fine for quite a while now.
However, yesterday when I wanted to read a CD, I received
an error message about a missing device.
I looked into this and found these two symbolic links pointing
to each other:
/dev/hdb -> ide/host0/bus0/target1/lun0/cd
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target1/lun0/cd -> ../../../../../hdb

I don't know what caused this. It used to work fine, but the last
time I used the CD drive was a couple of months ago.

/etc/fstab contains this line:
/dev/hdb /mnt/cdrom auto umask=0022,user,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,noauto,ro,exec 0 0

I'm guessing that I need to use mknod to recreate one of
these, but I don't know the major & minor numbers that I
need to use. I failed to find them on the web or on the Mandriva
web site.

What are the numbers to use here?
Or, alternatively, is there some tool in Mandrake 10.1
that will recreate the missing device file?

Thanks,
M.N.

Try

ln -s /dev/hdb /mnt/cdrom

No, don't! /dev/ and /mnt/ are two entirely different things!

I don't have linux at hand, but you can easily fix it.
Look at your hda device, IIRC it is:
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/disk or something like that. hdb is the same except it is target1.

Yves.

I looked at the other similar devices (I have 2 hard disks in there), and
theis is what they look like:

# ls -l /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0
total 0
brw------- 1 root root 3, 0 Jan 1 1970 disc
brw------- 1 root root 3, 1 Jan 1 1970 part1
brw------- 1 root root 3, 2 Jan 1 1970 part2
brw------- 1 root root 3, 5 Jan 1 1970 part5
brw------- 1 root root 3, 6 Jan 1 1970 part6

# ls -l /dev/ide/host0/bus1/target0/lun0/
total 0
brw------- 1 root root 22, 0 Jan 1 1970 disc
brw------- 1 root root 22, 1 Jan 1 1970 part1
brw------- 1 root root 22, 2 Jan 1 1970 part2
brw------- 1 root root 22, 5 Jan 1 1970 part5
brw------- 1 root root 22, 6 Jan 1 1970 part6
brw------- 1 root root 22, 7 Jan 1 1970 part7

so, which numbers should I use?
3,0 ?
22,0 ?
something else?

I tried to use 3,0 and 22,0.
Neither of them enabled me to access the cdrom drive.
I tried other numbers too, without success.

Help!

The hints above gave me more ideas what to search for.
I asked Google about Linux device numbers and found a HOWTO that
references a file /usr/src/linux/Documentation/ide.txt
I do not have the kernel source tree, but I did find a version of this file
on the web. It appears that the numbers for device hdb are 3,64
so the command I needed to fix this is "mknod cd b 3 64". The whole
fix is therefore:

$ su
# cd /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target1/lun0
# rm cd
# mknod cd b 3 64

To access the file system on the CD that is in the drive, I had to mount it:

$ mount /mnt/cdrom

Thanks for the replies!