Hi! I finally upgraded to kernel 2.6.13, added udev, hotplug, hal, dbus.It actually worked this morning! When plugggin in my usb HD's they showed up in /media/, but I could not see anything on them!? I tried to burn a cd with kb3, and saw both devices listed in there (hdc, hdd), even burnt a cd just fine. Tried mounting and unmounting various cd's, worked flawlessly. I was just working on adding more media support for dvd's, when I decided to restart for some reason. Now anytime I try to mount (doesn't matter what) it just hangs, and does nothing. My usb drives don't show up, k3b fails to start. I must have messed up something, but can't figure out what.. Can someone please shed some light on this?

One thing that might have caused it, was that I accidently created a symlink aka "ln -s hdb /dev/dvd"- which was wrong I meant to use "hdc"

so I tried removing the link with:
unlink /dev/dvd
rm -rf /dev/dvd
and recreated it like:
ln -s hdc /dev/dvd

after a reboot this link has dissapeared!?

Look in /etc/udev/rules.d/udev.rules for hdc or cdrom. Make your symlink there and restart udev:
/etc/rc.d/rc.udev restart

edit: removed post didn't read question in detail

This is what's currently in there, do I need to change that?:

# permissions for IDE CD devices
BUS="ide", KERNEL="*[!0-9]", PROGRAM="/bin/cat /proc/ide/%k/media", RESULT="cdrom*", NAME="%k", GROUP="cdrom", MODE="0660"

# permissions for IDE floppy devices
BUS="ide", KERNEL="*[!0-9]", PROGRAM="/bin/cat /proc/ide/%k/media", RESULT="floppy*", NAME="%k", GROUP="floppy", MODE="0660"

# permissions for SCSI cd/sg/tape devices
BUS="scsi", KERNEL="s[grt][0-9]*", SYSFS_type="5", NAME="%k", GROUP="cdrom", MODE="0660"

# DRI devices
KERNEL="card*", NAME="dri/card%n"

restarting udev didn't help! Should I just remove and reinstall udev, dbus, and hal?

Here might be another clue: It's telling me those points don't exist, but they are there!?

root@wildblue:~# mount -t iso9660 dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom
mount: special device dev/cdrom does not exist
root@wildblue:/dev# mount -t iso9660 dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom
mount: special device dev/hdc does not exist
root@wildblue:/dev# mount -t iso9660 dev/hdd /mnt/cdrom
mount: special device dev/hdd does not exist

jimi@wildblue:/dev$ ls -l cdrom
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 2006-04-21 00:24 cdrom -> hdd --->this must be wrong!?
jimi@wildblue:/dev$ ls -l hdc
brw-rw-rw- 1 root cdrom 22, 0 2006-04-21 00:24 hdc
jimi@wildblue:/dev$ ls -l hdd
brw-rw-rw- 1 root cdrom 22, 64 2006-04-21 00:24 hdd

What does dmesg show?
dmesg | grep hd[cd]

It gives many messages like that:

dmesg | grep hd
hdc: lost interrupt
cdrom_pc_intr, write: dev hdc: flags = REQ_STARTED REQ_PC REQ_FAILED REQ_QUIET
hdc: cdrom_pc_intr: The drive appears confused (ireason = 0x02)

dmesg | grep cd
cdrom_pc_intr, write: dev hdc: flags = REQ_STARTED REQ_PC REQ_FAILED REQ_QUIET
cdb: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
hdc: cdrom_pc_intr: The drive appears confused (ireason = 0x02)

If you plug the drive in and type lsusb what does it say?

root@wildblue:~# lsusb
Bus 006 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 03f0:2911 Hewlett-Packard
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 04b4:6830 Cypress Semiconductor Corp. USB-2.0 IDE Adapter
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000


looks like it'spicking up my printer, but not the usb drive...

Ok! I fixed it by removing and reinstalling dbus, hal, udev, and kdebase.
It all works, except the directories for my usb drives still show "empty", any idea why it's doing that?

If you type mount does it show the drive as being mounted somewhere? Do you have an entry in /etc/fstab for mounting the drive?

I put no enties in fstab, I thought dbus or hal is taking care of that, maybe I ma wrong!?

mount:
/dev/hda6 on / type reiserfs (rw)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw)
/dev/hda1 on /media/fat-c type vfat (rw)
/dev/hda2 on /media/fat-d type vfat (rw)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
usbfs on /proc/bus/usb type usbfs (rw)

now,-this is strange! after I had everything working (besides that one usb problem), I did one restart. Now, no cd drives get recognized, no audio cd, k3b is crashing wile trying to start. The exact same problem I had earlier. I am wondering if I should give up on that hal-dbus thing. How do you guys usually go about making all that work, reliably? Just write udev rules?
I was suggested to look at the /usr/share/hal/fdi/90defaultpolicy/storage-policy.fd :

media true managed kudzu true true true true true true true true true auto cdrom cdrecorder cdrecorder cdrecorder cdrecorder cdrecorder cdrecorder cdrecorder true auto floppy true auto zip true auto jaz true true volume.fstype @block.storage_device:storage.bus disk zip volume.label false true true true true true true true false true true true true true true true true fals
Do you know what this means?