[Discuss] Fedora 28 Doesn't See External DVD Drive on USB Port

[nancythewriter7 at gmail.com (Nancy Allison)]

Thank you, Dan.

You've provided some details that I can follow, but I am not well enough
grounded to know how I would use them. (For example, I have no idea where
fstab lives or how I get to it.) If I can find someone to help me out
painstakingly, with a generous donation of their time and effort, I (they,
really) can undoubtedly fix the problem. I may wait until the next
InstallFest for help.

But this leaves me wondering, can it really be that everyone using Fedora
28 struggles along with this same problem that obviously affects plenty of
people? CDs and DVDs are not used as much as they once were, but they are
still in use. If you google "fedora 28 doesn't recognize external dvd
drive" you get people struggling with this back in 2010 and 2011. Is this
what Fedora is like -- everyone struggles with problems individually? And
you really have to have a lot of technical knowledge to deal with these
problems as they come up. Maybe Fedora is just too tecchie for me, but it
seems as if Ubuntu was, too, when I used it before Fedora. Maybe Red Hat is
easier for a non-technical person to handle?

Just thinking out loud. Thanks for the additional info.

On Sat, Dec 29, 2018 at 7:12 PM Dan Ritter <dsr at randomstring.org> wrote:

> Nancy Allison wrote:
> > Hi, all.
> >
> > When I plug in my external disk drive into my Fedora 28 machine, it does
> > not show up in Nautilus.
> >
> > I go looking online, and, sure enough, this problem has occurred for
> plenty
> > of people for 5+ years over many releases of Fedora.
> >
> > I find a discussion in which someone evidently solved the problem. Here
> is
> > what the person reported:
> >
> > "NVM - found the cause. Old entry in fstab for a second swap not present
> on
> > sdb1 and first USB disks being assigned sdb. Cleaned that up and now all
> > drives plugging correctly.
> > Willtech ( Sep 23 '18 )"
> >
> > How do I apply this information? Where is fstab? When does a first swap
> > occur? When does a second swap occur? What does it mean to be assigned
> sdb?
>
> /etc/fstab consolidates mounting information.
>
> Each active line defines:
>
> <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>  <dump> <pass>
>
> For example:
>
> /dev/scd0   /media/cdrom0   ISO9660     ro      1   1
>
> device/partition name, then where you want it mounted, then the
> type of filesystem.
>
> If you have a single disk called /dev/sda, for instance, you
> might see your external CD show up as /dev/sdb. If there's
> already a /dev/sdb listed in the file, that will conflict.
>
> Hope that helps.
>
> -dsr-
>