Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: Holly Bostick <motub@××××××.nl>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: [gentoo-user] Unmountable hard drive (already mounted or busy)
Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2005 17:34:38
Message-Id: 43383026.9010108@planet.nl
1 That about covers it... I know the events leading up to this situation,
2 but that's not helping me solve it.
3
4 Originally I had a 9GB drive on hdd which contained the original
5 emergency SuSE installation after I totally broke Gentoo (this was when
6 the PAM breakage progressively ate my installation, so many of you know
7 how long ago that was, the time of the Great PAM Uprising).
8
9 The drive has not been in use since I reinstalled SuSE (having
10 eventually learned to use it) and installed Gentoo on hda (which is when
11 the 9GB drive had moved to hdd from hda), and so the drive remained
12 connected as hdd but not in use (mounted, etc).
13
14 Eventually, in order to remove the drive and send it back to our
15 "emergency drive pool", I reformatted it with QTParted
16 to FAT32 (but the drive remained connected since I couldn't find the
17 time to shut down in order to physically remove it). Although the reformat
18 seemed to go correctly, I noticed that after having done so, I started
19 seeing messages at boot saying that the drive was listed with thus and
20 so number of heads and cylinders, the drive was reporting thus and so
21 different number of heads and cylinders, and that the drive's reported
22 numbers would be used. It concerned me (since I couldn't imagine what
23 was reporting the drive geometry in the first place, even though I
24 understood that whatever it was was reporting the original drive
25 geometry but had not been updated with the reformat), but the drive was
26 still not in use, so I let it go.
27
28 Finally today I removed the 9GB drive and replaced it with the original
29 drive that it had replaced as an emergency measure. The 'real' drive
30 that I re-connected is a 40GB FAT32 drive with 2 partitions, again
31 connected to hdd.
32
33 Because this is the real drive, with files that I now want to use, the
34 fact that every time I try to mount it, I get the message that /dev/hdd
35 is busy or the mount point is already in use (no matter what mount point
36 I use, even a newly-created one) has finally brought the
37 problem home to roost.
38
39 I get it that this drive -- or rather hdd-- is being listed somewhere in
40 both drive geometry and mount points, and this erroneous entry or
41 entries is what's preventing me from mounting the partitions, but I
42 can't figure out where this is happening. /etc/fstab and /etc/mtab don't
43 refer to it and mount shows it not to be mounted.
44
45 The only thing I can think of is that this is some kind of weird evms
46 conflict, and the drive certainly is listed in evmsgui, but really my
47 useage of evms is so very limited that I almost should go back to lvm2,
48 so I really am not getting how this interaction is occurring, and how to
49 stop it, if in fact it is evms that is causing it (which it probably is).
50
51 Can anybody mark me a path out of this swamp? I'd like access to the
52 files stored on this drive again.
53
54 Thanks,
55 Holly
56 --
57 gentoo-user@g.o mailing list

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Re: [gentoo-user] Unmountable hard drive (already mounted or busy) Holly Bostick <motub@××××××.nl>