Removable Disks in Linux Mandrake 7.2

[zaimorkai]

I recently installed Linux Mandrake 7.2, dual booted with Windows 98... both OSs work (well, windows as good as it can anyway) but for some reason, while I can access both my CDROM (Acer 8x4x32 CDRW, detected correctly by both windows and linux) and Floppy drives in Windows, I cant from linux... I'm basically a Linux Newbie... when I try to access them from the command line i get input/output errors, and from X I get a little lock icon over it and it tells me I don't have permission to access them... and I cant change the permissions on them. It does this for both Root and a standard user. Any help would be greatly appreciated

 

[ifincham]

Hi,



I would suspect your symlinks are wrong. If the drives are ATAPI/IDE drives attached to the motherboard controllers then they will have 'real' device names like :



/dev/hdb (Primary slave)

/dev/hdc (Secondary master)

/dev/hdd (Secondary slave)



(assuming /dev/hda1 is your hard-drive !)



If they were scsi if would be



/dev/scd0 (First scsi CD)

/dev/scd1 (Second scsi CD)



It is normal to have symbolic links called '/dev/cdrom' and '/dev/cdrom1' (shortcuts in windows terminology) to the above real devices and those links would normally be the 'device' you refer to.



It may be that you are referencing /dev/cdrom but that is not linked to the correct underlying device. If you do 'ls -l /dev/cdrom' you should get something like :



lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Mar 1 2001 /dev/cdrom -> /dev/scd0



(example where real device is /dev/scd0)



If its not showing the correct link then you would have to create the link as root :



cd /dev

ln -s scd0 cdrom (use your correct device instead of scd00



Then its a case of using 'mount'. The safest is to use type 'auto' which should detect iso9660 or udf etc. For example :



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



You should also have entries like this in /etc/fstab to make mounting easier :



/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom auto noauto,owner,ro 0 0

/dev/cdrom1 /mnt/cdrom1 auto noauto,owner,ro 0 0



Once you have entries like that you can just do :



mount /dev/cdrom



Remember, in linux, unless you have an automounter running in the background, you have to actively mount and umount (unmount) CDs. Audio CDs, however, are never mounted - the software just reads directly from the device file.



Hope this helps

 

[zaimorkai]

It helps a little... it helps me understand it better but it's linked to hdc, which should be right i think... i've got one physical drive (ide) in 2 partitions (3 counting linux) and then the atapi cdrw... when i do the ls for /dev/cdrom it says its mapped to hdc, and when i try to mount it it says its already mounted.. the partition of my HD that linux is on is hda4 or hda5 if that makes a difference... thanks for the help

 

[ifincham]

Hi,

If you just do 'mount' without any parameters it will tell you whats already mounted and where. Sometimes you get the situation where there is an automounter that will mount after you put a CD in the drive. Maybe thats whats happening... Try to unmount and mount :

umount /dev/hdc
mount /dev/hdc -t auto -o ro,owner /mnt/cdrom


Regards