cd drives do not work after doing hd install

[IamPi]

Hi,

After doing a hd install, my two cdroms do not work. One is a Plexterwriter CD-burner, and the other is a Panasonic DVD drive. Both are ide. Both drives worked perfectly when I ran knoppix off of the cd. But once I install to my hard disk, they both stop working.

In the beginning of the boot process, there is a message that the two drives are scsi, and that ide-scsi emulation is being used. Then later, there are error messages that sc0 and sc1 cannot be mounted. It is hard to see the exact messages because it is flying down so quickly. I know it would help if I could get the exact messages, but I'm not sure how.

Thanks!

[Stephen]

It is hard to see the exact messages because it is flying down so quickly. I know it would help if I could get the exact messages, but I'm not sure how.

Thanks!

Open a console window and dmesg | less to see the boot messages one screen at a time, you can move up and down in the window with the arrow keys. When you post the error messages could you also post your /etc/fstab file also.

[rickenbacherus]

cat /proc/scsi/scsi will tell you if they appear on the SCSI BUS or not. as will cdrecord -scanbus. If they're on the SCSI BUS then your problem lies not with SCSI emulation but your /etc/fstab (as mentioned above) and likely some symlinks. Let's see what this gives you:

ls -al /dev/cdrom

ls -al /dev/cdrom1

and so on for any device listed in /etc/fstab. These are 'symlinks' and if you have those links they should look something like so:

$ ls -al /dev/cdrom
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root            9 Aug 22 19:29 /dev/cdrom -> /dev/scd0

scd0 is the device name "SCSI Drive 0". This naming convention makes it possible for applications to use the same name for a cdrom drive no matter where it is on your system. In other words you could effectively 'rename' and cdrom drive "/dev/cdrom". Rather than configure each application (cdplayer, cdburning app. etc) most Linux applications default to automatically try to use /dev/cdrom. Thus the need for symlinks. It also makes changing out a cdrom very easy. How? Just swap it- you already have the driver for it and it's in use so you needn't worry about finding/installing a new driver.