On Mon, 2 Feb 2004, Ken Moffat wrote: > As to naming the cdrom, /dev/cdrom will usually be a symlink to another > device (e.g. hdc or perhaps scd0 if your distro uses scsi emulation for > read and write). If you are using the ide driver, /dev/hdc or whichever > won't cause you problems. Distros usually get these things right, but > maybe you compiled your own kernel and used different options. Since > /dev/cdrom no longer works for you, where is it pointing (or, > exceptionally, which are the device major / minor numbers, and is it > char or block - I'm only asking so you can understand why it no longer > works :) ?
Thanks for your response, Ken, which only marginally makes sense to me (not a criticism of you, but a statement of my poor grasp of things). I've made a mental note of "devfs" and will try to be aware of how it may apply to this matter. This is *not* a hand-compiled kernel (not by my hand, anyway), but the latest 2.4.x kernel from Debian (apt-get install kernel-image-2.4-686). /dev/cdrom is a symlink pointing at /dev/cdrom0. /dev/cdrom0 is, in turn, a symlink pointing at /dev/hdb (which is the device I manually entered into fstab to get it mountable). This is totally baffling to me: a symlink pointing at a symlink? The logic escapes me. What am I missing? Perhaps more importantly, what is the *right* way to work with the cdrom on this machine? I should make the disclaimer that the original fstab entry may have been /dev/cdrom0, rather than /dev/cdrom - I just don't remember for sure. I still can't see why a symlink should be needed for a CD drive, much less a symlink to a symlink: is this for the benefit of the user, the OS creator/compiler, the computer itself? Thanks, James - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-newbie" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.linux-learn.org/faqs
