Nothing Being Read by Floppy and CDROM in RH7.2

[Eroberer]

I found out that my floppy drive and my cdrom drive are not reading anything! When I type "dir," I get nothing, and when I type "ls -a" I get the old and familiar . and .. directories, which under DOS told me that the disks were empty. I know there are things on the CDs, and I know there are things on the floppies, but Linux just isn't seeming them. It has a /mnt/floppy and a /mnt/cdrom directory, though.

So what's up with this?

[Eroberer]

When it starts up, I see a line that says nothing is being automounted. Is this a bad thing?

[Dagda]

the cdrom/floppy probably isn't mounted. Mount it then try ls

mount -t iso9660 /dev/hd# /mnt/cdrom
cd /mnt/cdrom
ls -al

[Eroberer]

Will that automount the cdrom at startup?

[X_console]

No, but why would you want to automount the CDROM at start up? If there's no CD inside, then the mount will fail and you'll start getting errors. In Linux, you must mount and unmount a floppy or CD before you can use it.

[Eroberer]

Ok, I see.

that command didn't work, and I have a feeling that it's the iso9660 part, that I gotta change. All the help that popped up didn't tell me what parameter that was, though.

Is there a way that I can mount the floppy and cdrom at the same time, by mounting a directory that both of the drivers or whatever (mounting everything in /etc/fstab/ was one option shown in the help)?

[bdg1983]

You did change the '#' in

mount -t iso9660 /dev/hd# /mnt/cdrom

to whatever device your cdrom is I hope.

hdb primary slave
hdc secondary master
hdd secondary slave

[Eroberer]

yup, changed it to hdb. Everytime I on startup I see that the correct device, Toshiba DVD-ROM SD-R2002, is recognized, and that it is hdb.

It's a DVD/CD-RW combo, if that helps for some reason.

[Eroberer]

I type
mount_-t_iso9660_/dev/hdb_/mnt/cdrom

where _ = a space

It says it's a bad filesystem, wrong filesystem, or too many mount points, or something like that.

[Eroberer]

Ok, here is what it said in fstab, among other things =):

/dev/cdrom____/mnt cdrom___iso9660_____noauto,owner,kudzu,ro,0$

/dev/fd0_____/mnt/floppy____auto_____noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0


So do you think I should change the first cdrom to hdb (where mine is), and what do owner, kudzu, ro, and 0$ and 0 0 mean?

[Eroberer]

CDROM and Floppy successfully mounted. :p :D

I still want to know what kudzu is. The rest I can figure out on my own, but that seems like a program or something.

Also, funny thing, when I logged in a minute ago the thing said "You have mail" on the command line.

[ 23 October 2001: Message edited by: Eroberer ]

[Eroberer]

How do I extract tar files so that I can attempt to install video card drivers?

[ 23 October 2001: Message edited by: Eroberer ]

[X_console]

http://it.yorku.ca/moonfrog/tutorials/compiling_software.html

[kormoc]

Kudzu scans for new hardware. The mail thing is mail from your system to you.

[vee-eye]

And read the man pages for mount and fstab if you want to know everything about the syntax of /etc/fstab and of the mount command. Sometimes you can even get away with using auto as the type of device for cdroms instead of iso whatever. But I won't go into details about that here because I'm not too familar with it. Again, read the man pages.

peez ;)

[Eroberer]

Thanks, all.

Now, I've switched back to Mandrake 8.1, because I found some step-by-step instructions for installing my video card that I couldn't get to work for me under RH (the commands were doing things the instructions did not mention, it was extremely annoying), but now I can't get my floppy drive working. Whenever I say "mount /mnt/floppy", it says "unknown device: /dev/fd0", and I've managed to simply look at the fstab file, and it has it listed as an iso9660 file system, which is incorrect. So, how can I edit this text file under MDK? pico /etc/fstab does not work

[X_console]

fstab is a plain text file so pico should work. Just make sure that you're root when you do this.

[Eroberer]

Turns out I don't have pico on my system. IS there another text editor that comes standard with Linux, or do I have install pine or emacs or whatever to get it?

[vee-eye]

Ummm... If you did a standard install then I don't see why pico could be missing.

But anyway, try:

vim
emacs
mcedit

Those are three more text editors. mcedit is the easiest to use. vim is almost guarenteed to be installed, but it's kind of difficult to use.

You sure are full of questions, aren't you? :) Have you considered reading a book on Linux that could guide you through this kind of stuff from the very beginning? Running Linux 3rd or 4th Edition seems to be very popular for the newbie. Not that we don't want you to post lots of questions... ;)

[kormoc]

or ed
the first editor. Some distros have it as a sort of history.

[kormoc]

or ed
the first editor. Some distros have it as a sort of history.

[Eroberer]

Yea, I'm full of questions 'cus the insanely easy things that I require knowledge about are not well documented, and I don't want to spend any money on something I may be dumping later anyway....sorry to say that this is annoying. =)

I'll eventually be a master at this.

Now, is there any way that I can slow down scrolling menus? Like, when I just hit tab, and it wants to show all 3000 or so commands, can I have it say I have to hit enter before it goes down a screen? I could do it in DOS! =)

[Eroberer]

Got KDE up. =)

The how-to wasn't written very well.

Anyway, thank you all so much for helping. I'm off to play around a bit!

[lilrabbit129]

I for one think it's great to see your questions. I'm learning alot from what other people are telling you =)

.ohh well... when will this RH iso complete the d/l??????

[kormoc]

The day before 8.0 comes out