Hi all, I''m fairly new to the world of *nix, and I just got RedHat 6.2 up and running on a machine I bought today ($6 for an old 133mhz Unisys Aquanta DX ... WOO!). Installation went fine, and I''ve got KDE running. But, the CDROM drive is having issues. It read from the CD fine during install, but when I tried to put in a CD afterwards, it said that it couldn''t mount because there was no medium (it couldn''t find a CD). Tried with different CDs, and from both root and user. After I shut down and booted back up, though, it was reading CDs fine. Had some Rammstein going, checking out all my fun new Linux stuff, ya know. The usual. Left the room, came back maybe an hour later, and the CDROM wasn''t working. Strange, no? Does anyone have any ideas? BTW, after I shut it down, I fiddled around inside the case with some of the IDE cords...I don''t think any of them were loose, but maybe I pushed one in all the way and it''s fallen out again? Oh yeah, one other thing. I was reading the RedHat CDROM HOWTO, and it said to check my kernel timestamp with uname -a I did, and the timestamp is way back in March of 2000 or something. Is this a problem? Is the timestamp supposed to be this old, or is it supposed to reflect when I compiled the kernel? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

If the CDROM drive works only at certain times, I''d blame the drive itself unless some other issue was obvious (only certain CD''s don''t work, or whatever; but that doesn''t sound like your problem).

About the kernel: I''m relatively sure that''s when the kernel was compiled. That''s a very old distribution, so its kernel probably was compiled back then. If you want to have an exercise in ''getting to know lower-level Linux'' you can try to update it on your own .