Hi

I have recently installed VL 5.8 standard on my x86 PC. Everything works fine except for the CD and DVD drives. I have one CD ROM, one CD RW and one DVD ROM drive on this machine. When I try to read a CD or DVD in these drives nothing happens. It is like they have not been mounted at all. I checked the fstab and there are entries for each of these drives in it. But when I give "mount" command in terminal no CD, DVD shows up; only the HD partitions are shown as mounted. I have checked dmesg and all three drives show up there as hdb, hdc and hdd. I have tried to mount them using mount command but nothing happens. I suspect there is something wrong with the fstab entries...like they are linked to some wrong device???

Incidentally I have ubuntu, suse and puppy live cd on the same machine and in all of them the drives work just fine.

Many thanks for your help!

Give your fstab file, and the output of mount <mount point of your cd drive> and mount <mount point of your dvd drive>.

The default mountpoints for Vector are seriously screwy. I had to do run stat on all the different /dev/ symlinks before I found which drive was mounted where.

On the default taskbar there is a harddrive icon which lets you mount all available drives and that helped me.

Sorry for the delay in posting back.

Here is what I see using dmesg:

root:# dmesg | grep CD
hdb: HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GSA-4167B, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
hdc: CREATIVE CD5220E-F, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
hdd: Hewlett-Packard CD-Writer Plus 9300, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive

Here is my fstab (the relevant portion):

# The Linux partitions
/dev/hda1 / ext3 defaults 0 1
/dev/hda3 /home ext3 defaults 0 2
# CDROM, CDWRITER, DVD
/dev/cdrom2 /mnt/cdrom2 iso9660 users,noauto,ro
/dev/cdrom1 /mnt/cdrom1 iso9660 users,noauto,ro
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 users,noauto,ro
/dev/hdb /mnt/dvdram iso9660 users,noauto,ro

And this is the really puzzling bit ... Here is what I see (or more to the point, dont see) in /dev directory:

file:///dev/fd0

file:///dev/fb0

file:///dev/dsp

file:///dev/core

file:///dev/console

file:///dev/coldplug

file:///dev/audio

file:///dev/agpgart

file:///dev/adsp


In other words no sign of any /dev/cdxxx!!!. I did look under /media but there is no sign of these files anywhere.

And yes I tried to mount them using the icon on the tasdkbar but again they stubbornly stay unmounted.

Thanks for your help!

Yours very puzzled!!!

What happens if you run a "mount -a"? Does it mount the CDs? Do you get any errors?

/dev/cdrom should be a link to the actual device i.e. /dev/hdc.
Look at the output of the ls command to see what device /dev/cdrom is actually pointing. i.e.
ls -l /dev/cdrom

Since you stated that /dev/cdrom does not exist you can create /dev/cdrom via the ln command. Example:
ln -s /dev/hdb /dev/cdrom (must be root)

Sorry for the late post but I have finally figured it out and got them working! Thanks for your help Berto and Michaelk. Yes the problem was with the sym links. Once I had the right sym links to the right devices it all fell into place.

But I have to say VL has the strangest CD/DVD mapping I have seen in Linux so far. It seems to have one link per function of the drive. So for a CDRW drive it actually maps it out as one CDROM, one CDWriter. Similarly for a DVD it has a CDROM, CDWriter, DVDROM mappings.

Hope I am right??!!

Thanks once again.