Sun CD ROM Troubleshooting

Many CD ROM problems are software rather than hardware problems. If your problem is hardware-related, you can look at our Hardware Diagnostics page. Our page on Hard Drive Connectivity may also be useful by analogy.

Some Sun patches resolve security holes in vold by commenting devices out of the /etc/rmmount.conf file. While this is effective, it also disables the devices that are commented out.

For vold to work with your CD ROM and floppy drives within CDE in the designed fashion, you should uncomment the following lines in your /etc/rmmount.conf:

ident hsfs ident_hsfs.so cdrom
ident ufs ident_ufs.so floppy cdrom pcmem
ident pcfs ident_pcfs.so floppy pcmem
action cdrom action_filemgr.so
action floppy action_filemgr.so

Note that this will allow mounted CDs and floppies to be mounted with SUID permissions. For systems where this is inappropriate, your /etc/rmmount.conf file should also contain the following:

mount * ufs -o nosuid
mount * hsfs -o nosuid

(Note that pcfs does not understand SUID, so pcfs does not pose a risk in the same way that hsfs and ufs do.)

The Solaris Volume Manager documentation contains substantial additional information about the operation of vold.