Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Hot Swapping [Was: Mounting my DVD-R Drive]

My ultrabay has a DVD multiburner/CDRW that I can put in instead of my hard drive. I can mount the drive, but I can't mount the DVD/CDRW drive.

I've tried

mount -t iso9660 -o ro /dev/cdrom /media/ultra

but I get back an error

special device /dev/cdrom does not exist

I try

mount -t iso9660 -o ro /dev/hdc1 /media/ultra

and I get back

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdc1,
missing codepage or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so

So, I try

mount -t auto -o ro /dev/hdc1 /media/ultra

and I get back

mount: you must specify the filesystem type

I should say that I have a video dvd in the drive right now. Maybe if I try a data dvd or a data cdrom in there it will be different. But, I do need to be able to watch dvd's on my laptop, too....

Update:
I just tried it with a CDR that I burned under Windows, and shows up under windows, and I get the same results.

Update:
I had rebooted when I was trying this, and it didn't work. I just rebooted now, and it's working. I can eject the disk and put in a new one, and it all works.

I did notice that when I just issue mount, with no parameters, it lists the media in the drive as /dev/hdc, with no number. I tried manually

mount /dev/hdc /media/ultra

and that worked.

I'm not sure why it all worked. I want to try pulling the dvd drive and putting in my hard drive to see what happens.

Update:
As the title change implies, I've decided/figured out that it's a hot swapping issue. If I boot with the hard drive in, I can't use the DVD. If I boot with the DVD, I can't use the hard drive. I have to investigate the hot swapping issue.

1 comment:

Deven Phillips said...

Hard drives have partitions, while optical discs do not; so the quick and simple explanation is that /dev/hdc is the CD-ROM drive, and /dev/hdc1 would have been the first partition on CD if that were possible.