CD-ROMs and DVDs

You usually attach CD and DVD drives to a SCSI or EIDE(ATA) bus; which driver you use depends on the bus.

Ensure that the hardware is set up correctly and that the BIOS detects the hardware properly. If you attached the drive to an EIDE bus, simply use the devb-eide driver. If the drive is on a SCSI bus, you need to determine the proper driver for your SCSI interface; see "Hard disks," below.

By default, the drivers load the cam-cdrom.so shared object, which provides a common access method for CD-ROM devices. Depending on how you start the driver, it also loads one of the following:

Note: We've deprecated fs-cd.so in favor of fs-udf.so.

CD-ROM and DVD-ROM devices both appear in the /dev directory as /dev/cdx, where x is the number of the drive, starting at 0. Simply mount the drive using the mount utility, specifying cd or udf as the type of filesystem. For example:

mount -t cd /dev/cd0 /fs/cdrom
mount -t udf /dev/cd0 /fs/dvdrom

You don't need to remount the drive when you change disks. For information about specific options, see cam-cdrom.so, fs-cd.so, and fs-udf.so in the Utilities Reference.

You can treat DVD RAM drives like hard disks. They appear in the /dev directory as a CD, but you can mount and treat them just like a hard disk—see "Hard disks," below.