by Hi,
as a newbie for Linux, I encountered, as many among you, a serious
CD problem. But I managed to solve it somehow. This is what I did:
a) make a (I hate this word) DOS partition on your hard disk, which
you probably already have.
b) copy the complete RedHat directory from the CD to this partition.
Watch out for those '+' characters in some RPM-files, the dos
copy-utility doesn't copy these (but stops there, so you have to
copy many things by hand one at a time, try wilcards for each
letter of the alfabet, eg. copy h:a* d:, etc..)
c) install Linux from your hard drive (with use of the two boot
floppies). This should go smoothly.
d) Now to get your CD to work: enter the following line at the end of
the file /etc/rc.d/rc.local (which is only executed at startup):
/sbin/modprobe cdu31a.o cdu31a_port=0x340 cdu31a_irq=0
You can replace cdu31a by your cd-module, with the right parameters.
Reason (I think): the kernel for RedHat 4.0 is compiled so as not to
support modules (see your manual about this). So writing an extra line
in your lilo.conf file doesn't do anything if that module isn't compiled
in the kernel directly. Now is you start X windows, you can start the
tool "kernelcfg", where you can check if your CD is compiled in the
kernel or as to be a module. The latter is the case for CDU31a Sony
CDroms. In the same tool, you can make this module by simply clicking
"add", and entering the right parameters. Now the module is created and
you have to incorporate it into the kernel. See your manual about how to
recompile your kernel to support modules and then incorporate these.
Normally, you didn't change the kernel, so all you should do is doing
the instructions for adding the modules. But when you enter the first
instruction (I forget the name), you should see a message that the
current kernel does not support messages.
I didn't want to rebuild mine, so I just put that one instruction in
the rc.local file, and from now on, I can mount my cd without problems,
but remember to create an entry in the fstab file, with the right
options for your cd mount point (see documentation). Two of those
options are:
noauto (as not to mount the cd at startup, otherwise you could have
problems if there is no cdrom in your cdplayer)
ro (read-only)
The third option is to grant everybody the possibility to mount the CD,
, I guess it's name is "users" (see documentation)
Please let me know if I was wrong somewhere in my explanation.
Greetings,
Alcatel Bell, Kontich, VH323 tel: (32/3) 450 3683