Hi all,

This is my first attempt at installing Linux, and I am having some real problems. Most pressing is my inability to read from the CD drive or floppy drive.

Admittedly, I know zero about Linux, but here is what I have perceived. I installed Mandrake 10 by booting with Disc 1 in the CD drive, so I know the CD drive works just fine. Directories /mnt/floppy and /mnt/cdrom exist, so I assume that the two drives were mounted (is that the right term?), but when I go to those directories with Konquorer, they are always empty. In fact, it doesn't even look like Mandrake tries to read the discs; no lights, no noises, nada. And no icon appears on my desktop to indicate that a disk is in the drive.

I also know that the floppy drive works fine; using the CD drive to boot SuSE liveEval, I was able to access the floppy just fine.

Anything I can do to see what's going on?

The other major issue is that I can't get my wireless USB adapter to work, but that's another post and another time. First things first.

Please help me get this figured out--a newbie in need!

Thanks!

Do you use KDE? If you do you can add an applet to the bar which contains the devices.
Right click on the taskbar->add->applet->devices. I think it displays mounted devices by default but you can check by right clicking on it and clicking on configure. With this applet you can see if devices are mounted or not, although you can also look at /etc/mtab. You can mount and unmound devices with this applet as well.
There are also mount commands. Type man:mount in the konqueror location bar to see about it. Also type man:umount to see about the command to unmount devices.

And the directories need to be there in order for the device filesystem to be mounted on it.

What I get from your post is that you open /mnt/cdrom in konqueror, and the page is empty. This means either the CD-ROM drive is not mounted, or regular users do not have the right to read the contents of mounted devices. Open mcc [The Mandrake Control Center] / Mount Points / CD-ROM. Select Options - click OK. Be sure Supermount and User are check marked. This should let you access the CD-ROM. Do the same for the Floppy drive. mcc will ask you to save the configuration each time you make a change and click OK - answer 'Yes' both times.

HTH,

OK, I have tried all of the above suggestions now, and here are my results:

I added the applet to the menu bar. It only shows the floppy. When I click on the floppy, my options are "Open" or "Mount", neither of which work. Every time I try to do anything, it says "Error: mount: only root can mount none on /mnt/floppy Please check that a disk is entered correctly" (which it is)

In /etc/mtab, it reads as follows:

/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part5 / ext3 rw 0 0
none /proc proc rw 0 0
none /dev devfs rw 0 0
none /dev/pts devpts rw,mode=0620 0 0

In /etc/fstab, it reads as follows:

/dev/hda5 / ext 3 defaults 1 1
none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0
none /mnt/cdrom1 supermount dev=/dev/hdb,fs=auto,ro,--,umask=0,user,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,noauto 0 0
none /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=ext2;vfat,--,umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-1,sync,codepage=850 0 0
/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows ntfs umask=0,nls=iso8859-1,ro 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0

I went to the control center and did as you suggested for the CD drive. The floopy drive did not show up there. From what I saw in fstab, I figured that I needed to add "user" to the floppy entry, but didn't know how to edit that file.

I decided to restart to see if the changes took effect, but am still unable to see anything on the drives. Both report "0 Items - 0 Files - 0 Folders" when I look at them in Konqueror.

Any ideas?

Thanks again for the help!

- Andy

Hi Andy,
The /etc/mtab file shows which devices are mounted so, from that file I can see that the floppy driver and cdrom driver are not mounted.
My /etc/fstab readings for the cdrom drive and floppy drive respectively are:

/dev/hda /mnt/cdrom auto umask=0,user,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850,noauto,ro,exec 0 0

none /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=ext2:vfat,--,umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-15,sync,codepage=850 0 0

I don't know if they will come out nice because of word wrapping.
Try replacing your entries with these ones and rebooting. I don't know why Mandrake wouldn't add the properly but try it anyway.

Wait stop! Go to hardrake(type hardrake2 in a console as root) and check the /dev/entries for the cdrom and floppy drives and edit mine as you need to.

Unfortunately, still no go. I tried changing the fstab file, but it didn't do any good. Arghhh! I'll let you all know if I get any further; maybe I'll try to put 9.2 on and if it works, upgrade the kernel. That will be another challenge...

Two things. One, stick with Linux, it can be a little rough around the edges, but overall it is a great OS and a good cause, and it fun too.

Two, I just upgraded from 9.1 and wammo, not CD Rom either :-(

Keep us informed if you solve this one.

Do you have the magicdev package installed? You can type the following command in console to check it out:
rpm -qa | grep magicdev
If so, type the following command to remove it:
rpm -e -what you get after running the command above-