How can I get Slack 9.1 to recognise DVD and CDRW?
 

Thanks to excellent assistance from these forums, I now have a nice little Slack-based setup running on an old laptop. :D Now I want to start on the biggie... whipping my Slack 9.1 partition on my main PC into shape, so I can dump Windows altogether.

The main PC in question has both a DVD-ROM and a CDRW, but Slack only recognises the DVD as standard and treats it as a CDROM drive. Issuing the mount /dev/cdrom command mounts the DVD.

Presumably I would have to amend my /etc/fstab file so as to be able to mount the CDRW to read files from it, but do I need to do anything else to get the CDRW working? (At the moment, if I download any software I have to do it via Windows and burn it to CD from there, but that seems to completely screw up the permissions.)

I also have a DVD and a CDRW.
Here's my fstab:

/dev/hda6 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/hda5 / ext3 defaults 1 1
/dev/hda7 /home ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/hda1 /winduhs vfat defaults 1 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,user,ro 0 0
/dev/scd0 /mnt/scd0 iso9660 noauto,user 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,user 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0


As you can see my DVD (hdc) is /dev/cdrom and gets mounted at /mnt/cdrom.
This is fine as I believe Slack will automatically symlink /dev/cdrom to /dev/dvd
during install. If it doesn't you can do this yourself.

/dev/scd0 is my CDRW (hdd)
It is an ide burner that is run with scsi emulation, which is required with kernel 2.4.x.
I had to add the /dev/scd0 line to fstab myself.
I also added the directory /scd0 to /mnt.

You will also need to append /etc/lilo.conf as follows:

# LILO configuration file
# generated by 'liloconfig'
#
# Start LILO global section
append="hdd=ide-scsi"
boot = /dev/hda
message = /boot/boot_message.txt
prompt
timeout = 1200
# Override dangerous defaults that rewrite the partition table:
change-rules
reset
blah, blah, blah.

This is assuming of course that your CDRW is hdd. Adjust to suit.
After editing /etc/lilo.conf you must run:

/sbin/lilo as root, then reboot.

Also you will see I have changed all removable media drives in
fstab to user instead of owner
(/dev/scd0 /mnt/scd0 iso9660 noauto,user 0 0)

I then added myself to the disk and floppy group, then did a
chmod 660
for /dev/cdrom, /mnt/cdrom, /dev/scd0, /mnt/scd0, /dev/fd0, and /mnt/floppy .
so I can use them as a regular user.

That should do it.

Thankyou kindly, squire. I shall have a look at my fstab and see what's what...