ihave mandrake 9.2 (will upgrade soon to 10) but anyways, i can't get the Hard drive or the CD-ROM or Floppy to show up on the desktop. can anyone help me out?

try booting from the cd to install your new OS.

however to mount the cdrom, try opening a command line and typing:

mount /dev/cdrom

if that dosnt work then there is no entry in your fstab file.

so, as root type:

mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdrom /mnt

thatll mount the cdrom at /mnt

from there open up whatever you use to view your file system and browse to /mnt

ok. i will give that a try.

well it didn't work. it said that it was write protected and it wouldn't change anything.

well of course it is write protected, you cant write to any ordinary cd.

after you issued the mount command did you try to browse to the location at which you mounted the cdrom?

ok. it is mounted but i don't see it on my desktop when a CD is in there. what do i do to get that set-up?

Which WM?