More on the embarrassing admission

On Saturday, October 11, 2003, at 09:11 AM, Kevin Brown wrote:

> Chris Gehlker wrote:
>
>> Well, I chased the problem with not being able to dup disks from the
>> dvd drive in my iBook to the FireWire LaCie burner to a bug in the
>> YDL 3.0.1 installer. It seems that there is nothing like /dev/dvd or
>> /dev/cdrom after doing a clean install with the 3.0.1 installer.
>> Unfortunately, the way I discovered this was by re-installing Linux
>> on my desktop because I wanted to change the partitioning scheme.
>> I understand that the lack of entries in the /dev directories may or
>> may not indicate a lack of drivers in the kernel. Beyond that my
>> knowledge of the relationship between the stuff in /dev and actual
>> drivers is pretty sketchy. With this level of knowledge is it
>> reasonable that I should try to fix this myself or should I just
>> wait for Terra Soft?
>
> On my Red Hat systems /dev/cdrom and /dev/dvd are just symlinks to the
> real device just to make it easier to work with them.
>
> Even on an Apple they should follow the same convention for SCSI and
> IDE drives for naming.

You were right. All that was missing were some symlinks. I didn't know
what to link too, of course but I Googled around and found 'pdisk -l'
which gives a big hint by telling you that there is no media in the
right drive. Here's something wierd. The ATAPI dvd reader in the iBook
shows up as an IDE device while the ATAPI dvd burner in the desktop
shows up as a SCSI.

Anyhow, it all seems to be working. Thanks a bunch.