Hi.

I started from a new Dell 700 which only had one CDRom drive on it,
and one hard drive (SATA). I did install a DVD/CD burner as the second
CD.

I ran into a problem installing from the CDs, because of a problem I've
seen others have where the install would go a short way and then not
see the CDs anymore.

I got around this problem by doing an ftp install after loading the critical
install CD images on a different machine.

So I have Mandrake 10.0 installed, but no /mnt/cdrom was created,
and there is nothing in the /etc/fstab for the CDrom (or DVD burner, for
that matter).

The BIOS does see them.

I've messed around turning things on and off in the BIOS.

I also get an assertion on boot:

Assertion failed! dev->class == ATA_DEV_ATA,drivers/scsi/libata-core.c,
ata_dev_parse_strings,line=691

which could be related.

anyone else have this problem? (and more importantly, fixed it?)
I thought I saw something about it when I was
trying to fix earlier problems, but haven't been able to find anything with
google or with a search on this site.
any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
thanks, Cathy

Have you tried mounting them manually after booting up into linux? My cdrom is located at hda, but substitute what yours would be for it. Actually mine is a dvd rom drive and i mount it as a cdrom, heh. Still works, though.

when I try that it says that hda is not a valid block device.
From what I've read in the man pages, it should be
using hda and hdb, but it is not making them actually
refer to the drives.

That's strange. I don't know how to poke it to see if linux recognizes it - still learning .

Could you post what the make and models of the drives are? Does the hardware probing in mandrake's control centre say anything, or is that your "assertion on boot"? harddrake2 pulls it up for me.

This is what is listed for my dvdrom/cd+rw drive (dell inspiron 5100).
I have heard of problems between mandrake and certain drives. I don't want to upset you, but it broke these drives. It was mandrake 9.2, but maybe it still applies, i have no idea. http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d+drives+break

the CDRom is GCR-8483B

The CD/DVD, I need to take the machine apart to
see.
The above CDRom is listed on the mandrake page
as not having the problem of getting trashed by
the flush command in 9.2. However, the number is
close to some that did get trashed.

However, I think I will do some drive swapping and
see if I can discover anything (ie, does the drive
work anywhere else anymore?)