External USB issues...

[snafu]

I've been running Suse 9.3 for less than a week now. I'm simply trying to get a DVD I burned to run on a an external USB Lite-On SOHW-1673S.

I installed Suse using this drive. I've watched burned movies before using this drive via Kaffeine, Xine and Ogle. However, every once in a while it stops cooperating. I had never even considered the fact that it's an external drive to be the problem but after some reading I learned that Linux sees this as a SCSI device?

I checked Yast and the drive was being seen as a SCSI device and a USB device and being given 2 device names (/dev/sr0 and /dev/sg0) as well as sym links coming and going as well as the drive being mounted as /dev/<CD Title> in /etc/fstab.

Basically, I was hoping someone could clarify the status of external USB drives and Linux and maybe suggest a way to force the drive to be either SCSI or USB, not both. Any help would be appreciated.

[zeeone]

Good question, when the DVD stops working, have you unpluged it, wait a few moments then plug it back in? Do you have USB 1 or 2? I also notice that each distro treat the devices differently.

[wpercybrooks]

Hi, I'm having a similar problem but I use Fedora 2. I've tested an IDE to USB enclosure with a HDD an it worked fine. Now, I'm trying to use the same enclosure but with an DVD drive. I can burn CDs and DVDs sucessfully using cdrecord with dev=0,0,0, but when I try to mount the disk for reading it I simply cannot find what device to mount!! all entries in /dev/sdXX fail with the message "/dev/sdXX is not a valid block device". Any ideas???