[Sussex] /cdrom question

[John Crowhurst]

> Hi all,
>
> In the course of installing Star Office yesterday, I ran a file search
> for  "so*" & accidentally found a file "/dev/sonycd".
>
> I'm just wondering if this might be connected in some way to my
> machine's  problems in reading the Debian 3 CDs.. Or it might be nothing
> to do with it  at all.

I doubt this is your problem. The devices in /dev/ are simply files that
interface with the kernel so that the file system (and other user
programs) can use the devices associated with the names. If you did an ls,
you would see that the file looks different to most:

ls -l /dev/sonycd
brw-r--r--    1 root     root      15,   0 Aug 22 18:00 /dev/sonycd

The b tells you its a block device, and writes in blocks (rather than in a
stream of data like a character device does, like a serial mouse as an
example)

The 15,0 tells you its on kernel major node 15, minor node 0. Each major
and minor node has a significance to interfacing with the kernel.

> I checked /dev/cdrom & it is pointing to cdrom (audio CDs & every data
> CD  apart from the Debian 3 CDs work fine). I haven't yet tried
> recording  anything onto CD (I do have the ide-scsi module present).

Sounds like there might be something wrong with the Debian CDs, perhaps
they weren't burnt properly.

> What I'm not sure about, is whether this /dev/sonycd is in some way
> influencing my CD-R, which isn't a Sony CD at all - it's a Philips
> CDD3610  CDR/RW.

You may find that the driver for Sony CD also supports the Philips CD
drives as well, as they might share the same chipset.

--
John