I installed 2005LE on a AMD64 box. Everything went fine, except the DVD-RW won't read/write DVD's. Does CD's perfectly, but not DVDs. KDE apps give me a message saying no device DVD:

How do I fix this? The device exists

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 Nov 10 15:52 /dev/dvd -> hdc

and

brw-rw---- 1 jlaw cdrom 22, 0 Nov 10 15:52 /dev/hdc

That is where the drive is (the second IDE interface, master) Do I need to change /dev/hdc somehow? Create a new device?

Thx,

Jim

It might be helpful to know which programs you've tried. For example, did you try k3b? If so, did you install the k3b package or the k3b-dvd package as only the k3b-dvd package has support for burning dvds. Could you try this to see if it works... it eliminates the possibility that it's a problem with a front end:

install dvd+rw tools and then burn a dvd from a command line, in a terminal do,

su
password
urpmi dvd+rw-tools
insert a blank DVDR
growisofs -Z /dev/hdc -R -J /path/to/some/files

and see if it burns a DVD. That seems to work for me even when nothing else works a lot of times.

I have k3b-0.11.20-7 and k3b-dvd-0.11.10-7 installed, plus dvd+rw-tools-5.21.4.10.8-2. I haven't tried to write a DVD, just read them. When I put a DVD in the drive and try to look at the files on it using konqueor, it says 'no media found'. Also, CD's automount, but DVD's never do. It seems to just ignore them, or just not know they are there. These are DVD's I could read in the past, so I'm reasonable sure they are good (that the problem is not with the DVD disk). I tried to play a DVD and kaffeine gave the warning 'no device dvd:'

I checked output from dmesg and find:

hdc: ATAPI 48X DVD-ROM DVD-R CD-R/RW drive, 2048kB Cache
Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.20

Looks like just a CD-rom driver, not a DVD driver.

I found one thing that is probably wrong with the hardware assembly. I had two ATA disks and the DVD burner in the system when I installed 2005LE. I copied the ATA disks to a new SATA disk, and then removed them from the system. That's why the DVD is hdc. But now that I look at the cables, the cable goes from IDE0 to the DVD drive. The drive is config'd as the master. That would seem to make it hda now, so I don't know why the DVD-RW shows up as hdc under the hardware. And, it reads and writes CD's just fine. I've done several. I didn't try any DVD's before removing the ATA drives, so I don't know if it worked then.

So, could the change in the disks and cables have screwed up the device settings so it won't read DVD's? Why do CD's still work?

And, how do I fix my interface/cabling screw up?

JIm

Is it possible to mount the DVD manually? I think the command would probably be:

mount -t iso9660 /dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom

as superuser. If it gives you an error about /mnt/cdrom not existing, you may have to do a mkdir /mnt/cdrom to create the directory.

Also, have you tried both types of DVD media just in case the DVD drive or perhaps the drivers don't support the type your using? The DVD drive on the computer I'm using right now can't read DVD-R, but it does just find with DVD+R.

Did you think to a simpler HW failure on the DVD side? My laptop is under service maintenance for this reason: I was able to work with CD (both read and write) but not with the DVD.
My wife is still using XP an she noticed the problem burning a DVD.
At the beginnig I thought to a SW problem but when I tried to use the DVD with Linux, I had the same problem.
Checked the system at the service point and they found an electrical problem in the DVD circuit.

Change the filesystem type in the /etc/fstab from the cd/dvd drive to auto

Thanks for the suggestions. But, mount always says:

# mount -t iso9660 /dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom
mount: No medium found

It does this with data DVD's I burned using this drive, and it does it with a SuSE Professional DVD from work. I'm wondering about the hardware fault suggestion.

Any other ideas?

Jim
8-(

I'd say hardware is definitely a possibility at this point. Personally, I'd probably like to try it in a few different distributions or operating systems first before condemning it for good. Perhaps a couple of installation DVDs and see if they actually boot up and behave properly (you don't have to actually install anything, just see if they boot and sort of behave)? You could check and see if there is a relevant BIOS setting as well. The noise that the drive makes can give you some clues as to what is going on if you were planning on getting it fixed, but DVD Burners are so cheap these days it almost isn't worth the expense of having a professional fix it.