I recently bought another hard drive. the trick is that i could not mount any partition on the second hard drive, either fat or ext2, without affecting the availability of the cdrom. I mean, whenever a partition on the second drive is mounted, the cdrom can't be mounted any more.

Could somebody help? Thanks

Probably not without more information. Hard drives are master & slave on primary IDE? CD-rom master on secondary IDE? Your /etc/fstab would help too...

<edit>typo</edit>

How do you mount the new drive? W/o handcoding fstab, you're probably doing it wrong. If you don't want to handcode, then reinstall Linux.

The linux system in the primary master drive, with a fat32 partition in the same drive mounted. I could not mount any partition in the primary slave, neither fat or ext, otherwise, the cdrom could be stucked out.

The err mesg in response to "mount /mnt/cdrom" or operation via linuxconf (with a partition in the primary slave mounted) is:

-------------------
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/cdrom,
or too many mounted file systems

----------/etc/fstab-------------
LABEL=/ / ext2 defaults 1 1
LABEL=/boot /boot ext2 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/hda5 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/hdd4 /mnt/zip auto owner,exec,dev,suid,rw,noauto,kudzu 0 0
/dev/hda1 /mnt/win_c vfat exec,dev,suid,rw 1 1
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto owner,exec,dev,suid,rw,noauto,kudzu 0 0
/dev/hdb3 /opt ext2 exec,dev,suid,rw 1 1
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 owner,exec,dev,suid,ro,noauto 1 1
----------------------------------------------------------


Any help or idea would be greatly appreciated!!! ONLY, please don't, tell me to reinstall the syste, thanks:-)

Was the cd-rom perhaps set up as primary slave before adding the second hard drive? What does ls -l /dev/cdrom link to? It's just a symbolic link, and if the cd-rom moved the link is broken.

If it was primary slave ls -l /dev/cdrom will look like
/dev/cdrom -> /dev/hdb which is where the slave hard drive is now. If that's the case as su rm /dev/cdrom and then, still as su make a new symbolic link.

Assuming the cd-rom is now hdc (secondary master) you would want to do
ln -s /dev/hdc /dev/cdrom so now ls -l /dev/cdrom will give you
/dev/cdrom -> /dev/hdc

Small matter of fixing a few things, no reinstall over something like that.
Your fstab don't even have to change to accomidate the cd-rom change if the guesses I've made are correct. btw the cd-rom shouldn't be slave to a hard drive anyway, it will slow the hard drive down.

<edit.>dang typos</edit>

My case is:
Primary master: Hard drive
Primary slave: Hard drive
Secondary master: cdrom
Secondary slave: zip

The /dev/cdrom is linked to /dev/scd0 now, isn't it wierd? The cdrom worked well after I installing the second hard drive. Problem occurs only after I tried to mount any partition on the second drive.

Good lord, Psycho, how kind you are!

I just accidently made a stupid mistake. When I tried to make the /dev/cdrom link to /dev/hdc, I put the parameters in the wrong positions. So, now, my hdc became a symbolic link instead of a disk file:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Apr 14 16:54 cdrom -> /dev/scd0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 5 Apr 14 23:47 hdc -> cdrom

Could this be solved?

That's interesting, I get myself confused easily here... scd0 would mean you're using scsi emulation, which is usually used for dcr(ecordable) or rw.
That's fine, I think in fstab you're ok. Is it a writer or re-writer?

Was it on primary slave before adding the drive? Maybe you have a leftover hdb=ide-scsi if it is. Ether in /etc/lilo.conf or /boot/grub that should be changed from hdb to hdc.

Everything can be solved...

Was this in /dev?? It should have told you /dev/hdc already existed and not let you link it to /dev/cdrom. Don't make any more changes until I catch up here

So did you actually replace the /dev/hdc with a symbolic link? I doubt it would let even su do that, can't say I've ever tried though...

Oh-oh,, no reply. Check out man MAKEDEV if you really clobbered /dev/hdc You should be able to re-create it with MAKEDEV.

Dang, my bad Should have made him answer questions before dispensing advice. /me goes to stand in corner

RW

Yes, I did it. :-(. su could do that.

I'll try to figure it out tomorrow. It's mid night here. Psycho, thank you so much for everything you did today, actually, yesterday.

OK, i'm really sorry for the problems.

Just to be safe I would comment out the line in fstab for hdb with an # or disconnect the drive until you get the devices straightened out.

First. you should be able to put /dev/hdc back with MAKEDEV, see man MAKEDEV. I don't know if copying /dev/hde to /dev/hdc would work instead, I've never tried copying a device. Knowing Linux it would probably work.

If the cd-rw used to be hdb there is an append line you will need to correct. If you're using lilo, edit /ect/lilo.conf and change append="hdb=ide-scsi" to "hdc=ide-scsi" and rerun lilo. If you're using grub it's in /boot/menulist, just change the drive. You don't need to run grub or anything.

Having the /dev/cdrom link to /dev/scd0 would be correct for the scsi emulation. You can re-link that, ln -s something somewhere.

I'm really sorry for leading you astray, I will try to check the thread later from work.

--glenn

No, it won't. I tried yesterday.

Please don't say that. You won't know how I appreciate your nice help.

I am at campus and can't access my linux box. I shall try what you taught me later this afternoon. Have a great day.

Onward & upward

Was the cd-rw on primary slave before adding the hard drive?

You can recreate /dev/hdc by running:

rm /dev/hdc
mknod /dev/hdc b 22 0