I've lost my CD-ROM (kinda)

[Matthew Flaschen]

CwCrei wrote:
> So, question 1: All I have to do to get the CD-ROM drive to work as 
> intended from boot-up is to edit fstab to reflect the change of position 
> of my CD-ROM drive from /dev/hdc to /dev/hdb? It there anything else 
> that needs changing?

No, just /etc/fstab (make sure the other entries are right too).

> Question 2: How do I get this change to take effect properly without 
> rebooting? Reading the man page for mount, having corrected fstab, do I 
> just run "mount /dev/hdb", which will cause mount to go looking for 
> /dev/hdb in fstab and mount just that device as instructed by fstab, 
> without affecting anything else?

Yes, provided /dev/hdb isn't already mounted somewhere else.

> Question 3: For educational purposes, my actual /dev/hdc is a large HDD 
> partitioned 50/50 and then recombined as a linear mode RAID device, 
> appearing as /dev/md0 and mounted under /media a few lines after my 
> CD-ROM in fstab. Anyone care to take a guess at what trying to mount a 
> partitioned HDD as a CD-ROM, and then subsequently combining those 
> partitions as a linear RAID device and mounting that at boot time will 
> have on the integrity of my data?

None, I think.  First, /media/cdrom0 doesn't have any inherent meaning.
 It's really just an empty folder that acts as a mount point.  You could
just as easily mount the cdrom on /media/rabbit if you let every
userspace program know about the change.  Second, I don't think the
operating system would let you mount /dev/hdc *anywhere*, since it's not
a partition.

> ... the linear RAID experiment worked beautifully, and continues to do 
> so for the time being.

Best,

Matthew Flaschen