Mandrake 10.2 Install Question

[EndGame]

I just now went to install Mandrake 10.2 after toying with Knoppix on the same system for a few months. Knoppix would find everything and boot up fine. I go to install Mandrake and it will not find either my DVD drive or my DVDRW which are both IDE. It does find both my SATA HD's but keeps coming up with an error that there is no CD drive.

How do I get around or fix this problem?

 

[drag]

Depends.

usually programs depend on symbolic links to your cdrom and dvd drives in order to find them easier. Generally they aren't smart enough which drive device is which simply by looking at them. (and usually permission setups prevent that from happenning in the first place.)

So what they look for is:
/dev/cdrom
or
/dev/dvd

The majority of the time this is done automaticly at install time, so I don't know why mandrake didn't do that. (if that is realy your problem)

So in order to create a symbolic link, I'd would have /dev/dvd point to your dvd player, and /dev/cdrom point at your burner. It's not realy going ot affect the functioning of either device what the symbolic link is, but most burning programs look for /dev/cdrom, I think. So it may be easier.

So if your secondary master is your dvd burner, and your primary slave is your dvdrom drive then you would go like this (as root):
ln -s /dev/hdb /dev/cdrom
ln -s /dev/hdc /dev/dvd

And that should do it. Most programs in addition to that can be configured to specificly use a device other then their default guess, check out the documentation on your application you want to use.

Also another issue is often permissions. So check out your /dev/hd# permissions by going:
ls -l /dev/hd(whatever)

and seeing the permissions. If you get a permission setup like:
brw-rw---- root audio (some date) /dev/hdc

Then it may be a permissions issue, HOWEVER, for more modern distros like Fedora Core3 the system is setup so that permissions are automaticly granted to local users. Not sure exactly how that works, so do a "ls -l /dev/hdc" as your user you want to be able to access the hardware and make sure that that is correct.

if the permissions are still incorrect you can add your user to the audio group (as in this case), or do a
chmod +r /dev/hdc
as a root user, although that permission change may not survive a reboot.

Also since your using Mandrake the first thing I'd try to do is go thru the gui configuration tools and see if you can manually set devices thru some dialog.
Check out the mandrake forums at mandrakeuser.org for better advice, maybe. I don't use mandrake so this is more generic linux stuff rather then something specific for that distro.

 

[EndGame]

Really odd.

As stated, Knoppix would find them with no problem, Mandrake wouldn't so being curious, I downloaded some more distros. Suse found them with no problem as did Debian and Fedora. I then suspected it could possibly have been a bad image or download so, I downloaded mandrake once again from a different source and burned a new image. No difference! Mandrake will still not identify either DVD drive while all the others will.

Anyone else run into this problem? As stated, I have two SATA HD's and two DVD drives on IDE. The board is an IC7 Max 3 with a 3.4EE P4, nVidia 6800GT by BFG, Creative Audigy ZS Pro, Hauppage P350 TV card and that's it really. Again, all other distros found everything including the DVD drives while Mandrake hung on not being able to detect a "CD drive" and would not install.

 

[drag]

I thought you were talking about not being able to play dvds or whatnot. Why didn't you mention that it was during a install?

If everything worked correctly with the other distros, and not mandrake, then there is a bug specific with mandrake

Check out mandrake forums @ mandrakeusers.org, if it's a bug with the installer then they will be able to tell you the specific work around the best. And they would like to know because most of the time developers take installation problems like this very seriously.

Otherwise it's very hard to figure this stuff out since the installers are very distro-centric.

 

[Hyperblaze]

Mandrake 10.2 is already out?!? Are you sure you don't mean Mandrake 10.1?

 

[calethix]

I don't know if you figured out your problem or not but I thought this might help.
I had problems with mandrake 10 freezing when it tried to detect my sata hard drive. I got around this by choosing more boot options. As the special boot option, I used 'linux noapic'. It says to use that in case of problems with network adapters or some other devices but it also fixed the issue with my hard drive.

The problem I have now is that even though mandrake seems to know I have a dvd burner, it doesn't create a symbolic link for /dev/dvd. Every time I create one myself, it seems to disappear after a while. I suspect there's some automated script that cleans things up and I need to just go through and find the 'proper' way to add the dev/dvd link in mandrake. Might be something you run into if you get past your installation problems.

 

[Nyquest007]

I am having the same problem with mandrake not seeing the cddrives on install. I have two SATA raid drives, two non raid IDE drives, with a DVD player and CD burner on the secondary IDE connections. It will boot from the cd, but will not bring up the prompts after the first hit of the enter key. It's strange, I will try the "noapic" command and see if that helps. For reference, I'm running the chaintech nforce3 board with 2800 A64 chip and 6800 GPU. Thanks