Can't mount / access cdrom on laptop after install

[GRNelson]

I have installed Red Hat Linux 7.1 on my laptop. The laptop is a Digital Hinote Ultra 2000. It has a single drive bay where either the floppy drive or CD-Rom drive can be installed.

The installation from CD-Rom works great. But after Linux comes up I can’t mount or access a CD in the CD-Rom drive.

Mounting fails with the message:
# mount /mnt/cdrom
mount: /dev/hdb is not a valid block device

Here is my /etc/fstab file:
----------------------------------------------------------------
LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1
LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
/dev/hda3 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0


Here are some relevant lines from /var/log/dmesg:
----------------------------------------------------------------
Linux version 2.4.7-10 (bhcompile@stripples.devel.redhat.com) (gcc version 2.96 20000731 (Red Hat Linux 7.1 2.96-98)) #1 Thu Sep 6 17:21:28 EDT 2001
Kernel command line: auto BOOT_IMAGE=linux ro root=302 BOOT_FILE=/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.7-10

Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 6.31
ide: Assuming 33MHz PCI bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
CMD643: IDE controller on PCI bus 00 dev 40
PCI: Device 00:08.0 not available because of resource collisions
CMD643: chipset revision 0
CMD643: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
CMD643: simplex device: DMA forced
ide0: BM-DMA at 0xfe00-0xfe07, BIOS settings: hda :pio, hdb :pio
CMD643: IO baseregs (BIOS) are reported as MEM, report to <andre@linux-ide.org>.
ide1: BM-DMA at 0xfe08-0xfe0f, BIOS settings: hdc :pio, hdd :pio
hda: IBM-DTCA-23240, ATA DISK drive
hdb: TOSHIBA CD-ROM XM-1602B, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
ide: Assuming 33MHz PCI bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
hda: 6354432 sectors (3253 MB) w/468KiB Cache, CHS=788/128/63
ide-floppy driver 0.97
Partition check:
hda: hda1 hda2 hda3
Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M
FDC 0 is a National Semiconductor PC87306
ide-floppy driver 0.97

-----------------------------------------------------------------

As you can see the boot process detects the CD-ROM correctly as:
hdb: TOSHIBA CD-ROM XM-1602B, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive

I am able to mount and read/write a floppy disk when the floppy drive is installed in the drive bay.

Here is some information from my /dev directory:

-----------------------------------------------------------------
# ls –l cdrom
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 8 Mar 21 17:33 cdrom -> /dev/hdb

# ls –l hdb
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 3, 64 Aug 30 2001 hdb

An attempt to mount the CD without using fstab produces the same error:

# mount /dev/hdb /mnt/cdrom -t iso9660 -o ro,auto
mount: /dev/hdb is not a valid block device

The hardware browser finds a “TOSHIBA CD-ROM XM-1602B” associated with device /dev/hdb.

I’ve installed Linux probably a dozen times from the CD drive over the last couple of weeks but can’t use the CD drive once the system boots.
Any help in getting this to work would be much appreciated.

[scanez]

Okay I'm not very sure what the problem may be (you do have a cd in there when you are trying to mount right? It seems you do) but I just wanted to say kudos on all the information you posted. That will make it much easier for others to be able to help ;)

[mrBen]

Agreed with the Kudos above ;)

I think it maybe that you are using a CD/DVD drive, rather than a plain CD drive. I know with CD--RW drives you have to do some monkeying with SCSI emulation stuff, and I think it might be the same here.

Unfortunately I don't have either, so I'm not much use :('''''

[GRNelson]

I'm not sure why it lists the drive as a CD/DVD at boot time but I'm pretty sure its not DVD capable. This is a rather old unit ~~6 yrs+.

[mdwatts]

Do you have the modules 'cdrom' and 'ide-cd' loaded? lsmod to show.

I've seen similiar problems posted here though I believe this is related to Mandrake.

cd /lib/modules/<kernel version>

depmod -ae