my dell inspiron 5100 comes with a cdrw/dvd combo. I don't know any more details about it... i'll look it up later... the thing is I've been trying to mount the dvd for watching movies and I don't know what I've been doing wrong...

I assumed the DVD is on the second IDE channel as slave or hdd... so I made a symbolic link between hdd and dvd
ln -sf /dev/hdd /dev/dvd

I changed my fstab by adding the following line:

/dev/dvd /mnt/dvd iso9660 user,defaults,noauto 0 0

whenever I try to mount the DVD it gives me this error:
mount: /dev/dvd is not a valid block device.
Is the problem in the symbolic link? How do I find out whether or not my dvd is actually registered as secondary slave? I tried to go to the bios to find it out but since it's a dell laptop it doesn't have that option in it.

Please, any help is a lot of help for a newbie like me.

/dev/hdd might not be the device, check "dmesg | grep hd" and what does that list?

Also, iso9660 isn't the default filesystem on DVDs, just data CDs.

Cheers,

Finegan

I did what you told me (very useful little command by the way), and I found out that my CDRW/DVD combo drive was hda.

here's more or less what it said:

Kernel command line: ro root=LABEL=/ hda=ide-scsi
ide_setup: hda=ide-scsi
...................
hda: Samsung CD-RW/DVD-ROM SN-324B, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive

so, I did the symbolic link thing again, except I did it for hda....

When I try to mount the DVD drive it says:

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/dvd or too many mounted file systems
(could this be the IDE device where you in fact use ide-scsi so that sr0 or sda or so is needed?)

That's that. I suppose I have to specify something to the system about the drive being ide-scsi. I hate knowing nothing about Linux.

Yeah, its going to end up as /dev/scd0, soo...

mount /dev/scd0 /mnt/dvd

See how that works, don't define a filesystem type either, see if it can guess that.

Cheers,

Finegan