[newbie] Unable to read partition table

[Dr. Antonio Botelho de Sousa]

Thanks to all of you that answered my previous e-mail. But really the question was not correctly formulated by me, so the answers are not what i expected.My fault. Try to explain better. First let me tell you about my machine: I have two hard disks hda , hdb and the first has three partitions: hda1 (Windows XP OS initializing files) hda5(Linux native) and hda6(swap). The hdb disk has the Windows XP system and is used as a store disk. There's also a CDRW hdc and a magneto-optical drive attached to a SCSI adapter that is sda. All this is correctly mounted in /etc/fstab and my /etc/lilo.conf has the append line to emulate the ATAPI CDRW as a SCSI one. Now what happens. When i switch the machine cames the LiLO screen. I choose to boot Linux. The next screen is the Aurora Welcome screen with the kernel version (Mandrake 8.1) in the upper left corner of the monitor. If everything goes right next we have a lot of messages scrolling the monitor showing the hard drives, the CDRW and the Optical drive. Then Aurora goes to the graphical display and the system boots to his end, and that's all. Now what happens to me? When i reach the welcome screen the system stops a little and instead of displaying the information about the drives it sends a message: LDP: Unable to read partition table. Then the booting goes on apparently without problems. But when i am in the OS if i try (as root) to type the command "cdrecord -scanbus", instead of displayng the CDRW and the Optical drive it says: cdrecord file or directory not found; cannot open scsi driver. And that's the problem. Question? Why it can't read the partition table? that�s the true problem; the other is a consequence of this error. I use Mandrake since version 6.0 and i never had such a problem. I think i have been a little more clear now. Can anyone help me? Thanks Antonio.