How do I find and access my DVD rom?

[axiopisty]

Hi everyone,

I just swapped out my CD-rom with an old DVD-rom from an old computer that was being thrown away. I think I have it installed right, but I'm not sure how to test it. I grabbed a DVD and put it in the DVD-rom. I installed mplayer. But I don't know how to tell mplayer where the movie is at.

I'm assuming the command line option to test this in mplayer would be:

$ mplayer -vo [url|path/]filename

But I don't know how to find the url.

Really, I don't need to use mplayer at all if I could just open a command terminal and cd into the dvd in the drive and look at the files on the dvd.

Thanks,
axiopisty

[kevmif]

/media perhaps?

[stevea]

Installed right ? Is there a /dev/sr* ? (typically /dev/sr0).

If so it's installed.
If not, look through the output of "dmesg" and see if it was recognized.

[axiopisty]

Thanks stevea,

Installed right ? Is there a /dev/sr* ? (typically /dev/sr0).
No, there is no /dev/sr*

I got this:
[axiopisty@localhost ~]$ dmesg |grep hdb
ide0: BM-DMA at 0xffa0-0xffa7, BIOS settings: hda: DMA, hdb: DMA
hdb: COMPAQ DVD-ROM SD-612B, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
hdb: selected mode 0x22
hdb: ATAPI 32X DVD-ROM drive, 512kB Cache, DMA
[axiopisty@localhost ~]$

So when I put a dvd in the dvd drive, how do I access the data on it? Do I have to manually mount the drive every time I put a dvd in?

Thanks,
Axiopisty

[johannlo]

do an ls in /dev

look for /dev/dvd, /dev/cdrom, also try /dev/sdX (where X is a number), /dev/hdX.

Looks like your target is hdb. When you put in a CD you should see a device appear called hdb1, try mounting that manually

you can also look at your /var/log/messages for the bootup messages, that should tell you what /dev/XXX the drive is being detected as

[milheim05]

For the time being I can only work from the command line. I think it's a driver problem with my graphics card. How would I navigate to my dvd-rom drive (given I know it's sda, sdb, or w/e) from the command line?

[tjvanwyk]

For the time being I can only work from the command line. I think it's a driver problem with my graphics card. How would I navigate to my dvd-rom drive (given I know it's sda, sdb, or w/e) from the command line?
You can't access a device straight away by browsing to its device node (e.g. /dev/sr0) - you have to "mount" a device node to a directory (mount point) which becomes a part of the filesystem.

You could try

su -
mkdir /my/mount/point
mount /dev/sdx /my/mount/point


Where /dev/sdx is the device node you know to be your DVD drive (the best way to find out is to stick a disk in and then run dmesg | tail). /my/mount/point can really be anywhere in the filesystem, but it's typical to put mount points in /mnt or /media. The directory must exist before you can mount something there.

[milheim05]

Perfect, just what I needed to know.

Thanks a lot!