CD Problems 1

[jeanpierre]

On my first installation of RedHat - every thing was great. I could read the CDRom. But I foolishly tried to re-install Linux after some problems with GNOME.

On the second (and subsequent)installations, I could not read CDRoms anymore - under text, GNOME or KDE. I can mount the CDRoms - i.e it recognises the drive. But refuses to read the CD, even when there is an autorun application.

Can anyone Help??? Thanks.

 

[ifincham]

Hi,

Assuming its not a hardware fault, I could only guess that you either have the wrong filesystem type in /etc/fstab or the symbolic link to /dev/cdrom is broken .

If its an IDE drive without scsi emulation then it would be one of :

/dev/hdb
/dev/hdc
/dev/hdd

If it were scsi or using ide-scsi emulation it should be

/dev/scd0

If you are mounting '/dev/cdrom' that needs to point at the correct one of the above 'real' devices as /dev/cdrom is just a symlink. You should see this relationship if you do :

ls -l /dev/cdrom

If there is no 'pointer' then you need to recreate that (as root) :

# ln -s /dev/hdd /dev/cdrom

(example - change /dev/hdd to your correct device)

Also, make sure you have the correct info in your /etc/fstab. Something like :

/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 ro,noauto 0 0

You can change the 'iso9660' to the word 'auto' to allow for mounting CDRW disks which are formatted with udf rather than iso9660 -'auto' should auto-detect the filesystem format .

If in doubt you can always mount by hand :

mount /dev/cdrom -t auto -o ro /mnt/cdrom

or

mount /dev/hdd -t auto -o ro /mnt/cdrom

etc. (where /mnt/cdrom is an example of where you want the mounted filesystem to appear. Must be an existing (empty) directory)

Then 'ls -l /mnt/cdrom' and the files should be seen. ('umount /dev/cdrom' to unmount).

The only other possibility is that you have the cdrom included in an automount map. In such a case you'd find it mounted on demand under '/misc/cdrom' .

Hope this helps