Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.hardware
Date: 1999/12/24

> As the system boots or when I try to mount the CDROM, I get this message,
> "Special device /dev/cdrom does not exist. Return 32."

Probably you have a line like this in your /etc/fstab:

/dev/cdrom          /cdrom      iso9660    ro,user,noauto,unhide

which tells your system how to mount the cdrom. The /dev/cdrom file should be a sym link to the actual cd-rom device. You can create it like this:

# ln -s /dev/hdb /dev/cdrom

Here, hdb means the second ide drive in the first ide port, which you should change to the actual device your cdrom is in. If your cd is an IDE cd, it is one of hda, hdb, hdc or hdd; if it's SCSI, it will be one of scd0, scd1, … May be your cdrom is something special and you have to use a different device. You can see that looking at the booting messages (with "dmesg | more").

Once this is done, you can mount the cdrom with "mount /cdrom". In case you don't have the /etc/fstab stuff, you better add a line like the above. In any case, you can tell mount all the information in the command line. Eg:

# mount -t iso9660 /dev/hdb /cdrom

Jorge JUAN CHICO