cdrom drives detected but no /dev/ entries for them

[Daniel Robitaille]

I have a installation with 2 IDE CD-Rom drives (one CD-R, one CD-RW). They seem
to be detected by the kernel at boot time (as hdc and hdd) as seen in the
/var/log/dmesg file:

hdc: CRD-8480C, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
hdd: HL-DT-ST GCE-8525B, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive

But no device file are created in the /dev directory for them (no /dev/hdc*,
/dev/hdd* or /dev/cdrom* files exist), thus making then unaccessible in Ubuntu.

[Daniel Robitaille (robitaille)]

Created an attachment (id=407)
if it can help, here is the output from the dmesg command

[Daniel Robitaille (robitaille)]

After a few semi-random tries, and a bit more of googling of the Ubuntu users
list, it seems that if I add "ide_cd" and "sg" to /etc/modules, the appropriate
/dev/hdc and /dev/hdd files are created, and a symlink /etc/cdrom pointing to
/dev/hdc is also created. And with the addition of the appropriate entries for
/dev/cdrom and /dev/hdd to my /etc/fstab file, the 2 cd-rom drives work
properly, and Nautilus can write to the cd-rw drive.

After a few years of using Linux with various distro, I don't think I ever had
to manually add a kernel module for something as basic as a ide cdrom drive;
which tell me this could have been a bit more user friendly.

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

(In reply to comment #2)
> After a few years of using Linux with various distro, I don't think I ever had
> to manually add a kernel module for something as basic as a ide cdrom drive;
> which tell me this could have been a bit more user friendly.

As you might guess from the fact that there are NOT thousands of other people
asking the same question, your experience is an exception.

Did you install from one these CD-ROM drives? Were they detected OK by the
installer?

What kind of hard disks do you have?

[Daniel Robitaille (robitaille)]

(In reply to comment #3)
> Did you install from one these CD-ROM drives? Were they detected OK by the
> installer?

This installation was a debootstrap installation done from my Fedora partition
(I always wanted to try that type of install, and Ubuntu was my chance to do it
a couple of weeks ago). So the installer was not used.

> What kind of hard disks do you have?
>
Your basic run-of-the mill and getting old 30 Gbytes IDE disk:
hda: Maxtor 5T030H3, ATA DISK drive

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 8509.