Almost amazing problem with CDROM drives...

Moonlight-Flower · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 15 Sep 2003 Posts: 135

I'm posting this for a friend. He recently decided to use gentoo on a Dell Inspiron 4500, and the installation went fairly smoothly. Did a stage 3 mainly because he had no internet access at that point, since we didn't find the Alcatel Speedtouch USB howto until later.

The installation went fine, and he decided to mount a cdrom later on. He typed mount /dev/cdroms/cdrom0 /mnt/cdrom0 (All these files/folders exist), and his system crashed completely. And now, when he boots up, there's no CD drives detected at all.

Which brings up quite a few problems, mainly the fact that portage doesn't work and he can't reinstall any OS since the CD drives aren't there.

Is there any more information needed or does anyone have any idea what's going on?

mickwd · n00b Joined: 04 Jun 2003 Posts: 70

Could be bad news if the CD-ROM drive is made by LG (which is often the case in Dells) - see here.

If the drive's broken, try getting Dell (or LG) to replace it - I've heard of a few cases where they've been happy to do this (as well they should).

Moonlight-Flower · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 15 Sep 2003 Posts: 135

Ouch. This is probably the case. Forwarded the message, will be contacting Dell about it soon.

Thanks~