I am running rh 7.1 on a cyrix mediaGX platform, i have had a CDROM connected all the time, as i installed RH from it. I also have used the CDROM without any complications before.

All of a sudden, mount reports: /dev/cdrom is not a block device (try -o loop).

i tried -o loop, then mount reports:
mount: no such device or address.
FAT bread failed
mount: you must specify file system type


or

/dev/loop0 no such device or address
FAT bread failed
mount: you must specify file system type


Any clues?

for mount to work it needs 3 things
1. a device to mount it from (/dev/hd#)
2. the filesystem type of the media (vfat, ext2, iso9660)
3. a dir to mount it to

an example on the cmdline should look something like:
"mount /dev/hdd -t iso9660 /mnt/cdrom"
check if mounts manually, then correct the line in /etc/fstab:

in /etc/fstab theres a line with the roughly same contents, lookin smptin like:
/dev/hdd /mnt/cdrom iso9660 defaults 0 0

just substitute the device ure cdrom is at from the example. look in dmesg or /var/log/messages for the line mentioning the cd.

*the "loop" part btw is used by mount or losetup to ask it to mount a file containing a filesystem, like a boot image for a custom bootdisk or an .iso file. this isnt needed for a regular cdrom.

Thanks... but i had no luck


The fstab file says:
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,owner 0 0


and my logs/messages says:
localhost upfstab: unexpected file type for /dev/cdrom

didja add/remove/reconfig any ide devices recently?

Check through the boot messages (dmesg) or just grep through /var/log/boot.msg for /dev/hd and see if you cd got probed.

Thanks, but I havent' added any devices to the machine, and i looked through boot.log and dmesg, but i can only find what i stated in previous posts.

At the time the cd stopped working, i was mounting/umounting it a lot, because i was looking for somehting on a bunch of cds without labels. could this have something to do with it?
I remember getting some funky "missed interrupt"s from hda0 at the time, which locked up the whole box.

missed interrupts from hda0? maybe ide0 - the controller

Bad controller/configuration? What's the chipset on the mobo? There's some good kernel support for older hardware.

I figured it out!

/dev/cdrom was empty, so i added the symbolic link to /dev/hdb (my cd).

and all was calm

Thanks all, sorry for being such a newbie