okay, i got a “new” (used) CD-RW drive and swapped it out for the old one, and adjusted the BIOS settings so that it showed up. now, when mandrake 9.2 is booting, if i hit “escape” so that i can see all of the text rather than the splash screen, it says “Mount special device: /dev/hdc does not exist”, and when i “su” and do a “mount /dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom”, it says “mount: special device /dev/hdc does not exist”… and when i did a “dmesg|grep cdrom” it didn’t respond at all… 8/
i know there’s got to be some way of doing this, because i originally installed mandrake 9.2 from CD-ROMs. am i really going to have to recompile my kernel in order to do this?
That would do it! Mandrake must have ordered the zip drive before the CD drive. Now that everything works, though, you have to be happier.
see here… apparently the drive was saying “no media present’ because it was looking at the zip drive instead of the CD… needless to say, it works now.
That’s “no media present” when there’s a CD in the drive?
It does sound like you get the right responses from the old drive rather than the new one. Still, it would be better to have it recognize and install.
both the old and the new CD drives are recognised by the BIOS, but the old drive says “no media present” when i try to mount it, whereas the new drive says “/dev/hdc does not exist” when i try to mount it. it actually seems like i get more of the “right” kind of response from the old drive…
You make it sound like your CD drive is recognized by BIOS – if there’s the right kind of kernel on teh disc, then it should recognize and install.
i could go to Re-PC or some place like that, and buy another hard disk, but apart from that, all of the hard disks that i know about are either not functioning at all, or are already in use in their own computers… 8/
and, besides, like i said, if the CD-ROM drive has “vanished”, how will it be possible for me to do another installation from it anyway?
Rats. Can you borrow another hard drive for a bit, so that you can move all the data off that you need to keep, and then do installation and the like?
i have been considering switching to a different distribution – ubuntu – but there is something standing in the way of switching distributions, which is that my CD-ROM drive doesn’t appear to work.
also, i don’t want to wipe the drive and start over, because i’ve got data on the drive, including a Mail folder full of messages that i don’t want to lose. and even if i did, i couldn’t, because the CD drive has “vanished”… it’s a catch-22…
that’s one of the reasons i hope recompiling the kernel isn’t necessary – why recompile in order to get the hardware that will make it possible for me to switch distributions all together?
Hrm. Well, that is a problem. Perhaps you should consider a different distribution? Unless there’s something significantly in the way of changing over.
As for recompiling, that might be what you have to do, yeah. There should be some easy instructions on how to do it, though.
i don’t know whether i have to recompile or not, but that’s the only reference i can find to answer why i have the problem i do…
and, technically, mandrake is no longer in exitence. apparently, some time within the past couple of years, for some unknown reason they changed the name of my distribution to mandriva. contacting them wouldn’t do me much good anyway, because i bought the disks from cheapbytes…
I don’t know if you really have to recompile. But if you think you do, well, then you need to get the latest kernel image, header files, and the like, then install them. Mandrake uses RPM, so there should be a package that you can install from there. That, hopefully, will make things easier. Mandrake should know what to do with the new kernel.
the question i have is, why does the “old” CD drive show up, but doesn’t register any media when i put it in? as i said, i originally installed from CDs, and shortly thereafter, the CD drive “vanished”. the linux CD-ROM HOWTO that i read says that The most common reason for this problem is that with some Linux distributions the kernel that is installed on your hard drive (or floppy) is not necessarily the same one that was on your boot disk. i get the impression that it will work, and the “old” drive will work as well, if i recompile the kernel.
i’m scared… do i really have to recompile my kernel? where do i start?
Very. With behavior like that, I’d be worried that your “new” drive is either quirky or defective. It should show up in the list when set to master or slave, regardless of where it actually is on the channel. That’s what those jumpers are for.
when the computer first turns on, it goes through the hardware to make sure that nothing has changed, and it lists the hardware it can find. with the jumper set to “slave” or “master”, the CD-RW drive doesn’t show up in this list, but with it set to “cable select”, it does… weird, huh?
Hrm. That’s a little odd by itself. Okay, secondary master should be /dev/hdc like you were trying to get. The BIOS behavior, though, makes me wonder what’s going on – if the jumper is set to Master or Slave, does the drive detect at all in the BIOS?
okay, so the IDE channel that the CD-RW drive is connected to is “secondary master”, however the jumper on the back of the drive is set to “cable select” because when i set the jumper to “master” or “slave”, the computer completely ignored the CD-RW drive and booted up to the hard disk without even considering booting from the CD-RW.
Yes, that’s what I meant. Sorry. I’ve been a PC person for a while, and so Mac hardware settings would be just as confusing to me if I had to deal with them.
IDE channel?
you mean like “primary master” or “secondary master”?
please forgive my ignorance, i’ve been a mac-head for most of my computer career, and, until recently, you didn’t have to worry about such things when dealing with mac hardware…
Dear God, I hope not. However, what IDE channel did you set the RW drive to in BIOS?