Half a Page of Scribbled Linux

Before getting too far into the DVD creation project, I thought I’d increase the size of my editing partion. Yes, these are the things I think when I wake up at 6 am. It’s 40GB, but since it’s a quarter full already and I’ve got lots more video to work with, I want to avoid the hassle later. The first step is backing up what’s there. Why not use the DVD drive? I poped in a DVD+RW and clicked on the DVD icon on my desktop. Instead of the directory listing in Konqueror, a message box came up telling me

Could not mount device.

The reported error was:

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?)

Pretty nice error message, huh? I had set up IDE-SCSI emulation earlier for the DVD burning tools, but I didn’t update my entries in /etc/fstab nor my links in /dev. /dev/dvd was pointing to /dev/cdrom which was pointing to /dev/hdc and there was no entry for the DVD in /etc/fstab. So I added /dev/dvd /mnt/dvd udf,iso9660 user,noauto,kudzu,ro 0 0 to /etc/fstab and made /dev/dvd point to /dev/scd0. Now I got “no medium” when I put a disk in. cat /proc/scsi/scsi told me the Plextor PX-708A was on scsi host scsi1, channel 0, id 0, lun 0 but not which device in /dev it was attached to. This ought to be in /var/log/messages (dmesg) but thanks to long uptimes and having a million Windows machines bombarding my firewill, the startup messages scrolled out of /var/log/messages*. After scratching my head awhile and contemplating a reboot to see the startup log, I remembered scd0 is the first SCSI CD device–my older Plextor PX-W1210S, which is actually a SCSI unit. After changing /dev/dvd to point to /dev/scd1, it mounted. I need some coffee.