the lsusb command finds my freecom writer, but i seem to be unable to navigate to it under emelfm I'm guessing its not mounted, so i joined their forums to ask questions, but cant post a thread there 'cos i'm still bein vetted or whatever in their signup process...

my fstab looks like this...the last line i added as a guess, because when i navigate to /proc/bus/usb/001 and tried to mount it, it said it wasn't in the fstab, after i added the line, it said it is not a block device ...

i'm only trying to get the device to read a few songs onto the hard drive (yes i did a hard drive install)

where am i going wrong?

any ideas?

The first field in your fstab entry is just plain wrong. You'll want to use whatever the kernel is calling your device (e.g. /dev/sr0). See the end of your dmesg output to find out what you should use.

Dear:

Post some more details, like, the output for the command <fdisk -l> etc. This would help us in figuring out the problem. Which OS do you use? Even I use a USB DVD writer and I have had no problems whatsoever.

I don't think fdisk is going to give any information. Certainly on my machine, there is absolutely nothing related to my USB CD-RW in the output from fdisk.

Have you even installed fdisk? What exactly is the output of <fdisk -l> ? I just connected on my Debian 'etch' and it worked with no issues of concern.

wow! all those replies over christmas!

the o.s. is the latest damn small linux, I can't do the rest as I'm nowhere near the computer in question, I thought the fstab would be wrong, but I guess I need to know a bit more about how it works in order to correct it.

I'll get back to this tomorrow possibly with a hangover and try to sort it out, thanks for the input guys.

merry christmas

ok, the relevant parts of dmesg, I guess are ...

It doesn't mean much to me, if anyone can use it to tell me what my fstab should be edited to include, I'd appreciate it!

fdisk -l says...
so I tried with sudo, and it gives even less...

It seems that at this point in time, the kernel is referring to your device as /dev/sr1. So, you could put /dev/sr1 in the first column of your fstab entry.

Edit: it appears DSL uses a 2.4 kernel, so udev stuff is irrelevant.

ok, the new fstab entry reads...
I still don't really see it appear anywhere, and it seems unmountable in emelfm

What do you mean? Please post error messages if applicable.

in some distro's, ubuntu for example, if i put a disc in, it would show up as an icon on my desktop, I wasn't expecting this from d.s.l. but I expected to be capable of getting to it via emelfm, the file browsing utility in d.s.l. ...

ok... I'm not entirely sure how i did it, but it looks like i'm in, some messing about with the "sudo mount" command in /dev seemed to do the trick, then i could navigate to it under /mnt/auto/cdrom

hopefully i can repeat these steps whenever i need to, it would be nice to have it appear on the desktop just when i plug it in, but this will do for now, thanks for the help!

I'm glad that this is here.

According to hwinfo --cdrom, the DVD writer is /dev/sr0
So I have the usb DVD writer mounted like:
mount /dev/sr0 /media/hpwriter

So now I can read what is on the DVD. Also, I have to remount the usb DVD drive each time I use it and umount before I can take the disk out. Do I have to add the DVD writer to the fstab entries if I want it to be mounted and unmounted automatically every time I use it? I wonder if adding it to the fstab entries will ruin it's ability to write DVD's in K3b.

Another thing:
When I mount the writer, I get a message that it is mounted as read-only. Is this referring to the media on the disk or the DVD writer itself?

I'm using SuSE 10.0.

I do not think that by mounting using fstab entries, you are ruining anything. Also, the Read-only is not to be worried. You cannot write data onto it, can you? You can use K3b for that purpose.

Thank you very much!
I just noticed that this is in the Linux - Distributions > DamnSmallLinux category and since I run SuSE, I will ask my further question about this in the Linux - Hardware category.