Q. How con I view a DVD-ROM or CDROM content on my Linux box?

DVDROM (Digital Versatile Disk Read-only memory) and CDROM (Compact Disc Read-only memory) are optical storage devices to store your data for future uses or for backups. May people use these disks to store movies, photos etc. By default many older Linux machines will not allow you to see the content of them. This is due that, they are not mounted by default in your box. We have to mount them properly so that we can access their content.

There are many ways to do mounting CDROM/DVDROM’s. One of the classic way is to use mount command which is available in Linux. Before mounting a CDROM or DVDROM we have to check what hardware file corresponding to our disk drive. If you have DVD Drive then you should see /dev/dvdrom or /dvd-rw file. If you have CDrom then you should find /dev/cdrom or /dev/cd-rw file. Once you are conformed about your device, you can use any one command mention below depending on your device name.

If your device is only CD reader use below command

mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdrom /media/

If your device is a CD readwrite use below command

mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdrw /media/

If your device is a DVD reader use below command

mount -t iso9660 /dev/dvdrom /media/

If your device is a DVD writer use below command

mount -t iso9660 /dev/dvd-rw /media/

Let us see what this command means.

mount is the command to mount devices files etc in a Linux/Unix box.

-t is the option to specify the format of the device, here it is iso9660 format. This is the format how data is written on to the device.

/dev/dvd-rw is a DVD writer present in your machine

/media is the point where you are going to mount your device. once you cd to /media you can see the contact of DVD.

Note:Some times you will not see /dev/cdrom or cdrw or dvd or dvd-rw files. At this time you have to know that it is associated with /dev/hdb or hdc etc.

We can do permanent mounting by using fstab file.

 

 

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Surendra Anne

Mr Surendra Anne is from Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh, India. He is a Linux/Open source supporter who believes in Hard work, A down to earth person, Likes to share knowledge with others, Loves dogs, Likes photography. He works as Devops Engineer with Taggle systems, an IOT automatic water metering company, Sydney . You can contact him at surendra (@) linuxnix dot com.