Greetings, and especially to the computing.net regulars. This time I will post a question regarding an issue I am dealing with, where I work. There was an old server here, which was bought before I got here and that it was marked to be thrown away. I recollected it, made the dust go away using an air compressor and I have trying to set it up to be an experimental web server. It's an relatively old server, specifically a HP Proliant ML 330 http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Home.jsp?〈=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=15351&prodSeriesId=254931〈=en&cc=us The problem is that I can't read anything from the CD-ROM drive. The Linux distribution installed is Debian 3.1 and the linux kernel is 2.6.8-2-386. And here's what I am trying to do: I double click on the Computer icon on the Gnome desktop and a windows pops-up that contains the following items: Floppy 1, CD-ROM 1, Filesystem and Network. Then when I double click the CD-ROM 1 icon I get a message box that says: Mount Error Unable to mount the selected volume When I click on the Show more details what I see is: mount: special device /dev/hda does not exist This got me searching the server case internals a bit and I have discovered some odd things about it. But before that, here's the lspci output: 0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: ServerWorks CNB20LE Host Bridge (rev 05) 0000:00:00.1 Host bridge: ServerWorks CNB20LE Host Bridge (rev 05) 0000:00:01.0 PCI bridge: Digital Equipment Corporation DECchip 21152 (rev 03) 0000:00:0f.0 ISA bridge: ServerWorks OSB4 South Bridge (rev 4f) 0000:00:0f.1 IDE interface: ServerWorks OSB4 IDE Controller 0000:01:04.0 SCSI storage controller: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic 53c895a (rev 01) 0000:01:05.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corp. 82557/8/9 [Ethernet Pro 100] (rev 08) 0000:01:06.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Rage XL (rev 27) 0000:01:07.0 System peripheral: Compaq Computer Corporation Advanced System Management Controller So, inside the box there are: one HDD, one FDD, one Iomega ZIP Drive, one CD-ROM drive and last but not least there is on big server feature board (as described in the server documentation) that stretches from the back of the server case to the front. Of course there is also the server's motherboard. The HDD gets connected with a SCSI cable to the server feature board on it's SCSI connector and nothing else is on the SCSI cable. The FDD, the ZIP Drive and the CD-ROM are all connected with the following odd connection. There is one IDE cable that is connected to what is documented as a diskette drive connector and a primary IDE connector on the server motherboard. This is sort of a special IDE cable that is split and it's width is different on each end. More specifically: the cable starts connected to the server's motherboard Primary IDE connector, splits, the one end goes to the FDD and the other end goes up connects to the ZIP drive then to the CD-ROM drive and finally connectes on the diskette drive connector. I'll have to note here that I had no problem transferring files using the FDD, I've never tried to transfer anything using the ZIP Drive but as you may already have noticed it's not listed on the icons showing when I double click on the Computer icon and that the CD-ROM is a CRD-8402B that bears the Compaq mark but all searched point that it's vendor it's LG. Also note that I've removed the CD-ROM and installed it somewhere else and found out that it can read the intented CD-ROM disc. So, any ideas anyone? Thanks in advance!

Is it set as master or slave? Have you tried mounting it by hand? Something like: # mount -t iso9660 /dev/hda /mnt/cdrom Have a look through the output of dmesg to see if it is being detected or if there are any errors. What is the output of: $ ls -R /proc/ide

The drive is set as slave, the bios finds it and recognizes it and even I can boot into Memtest+ bootable cd-rom. The output of: ls -R /proc/ide is what follows: /proc/ide: drivers