newly added harddisk unmountable, other neighter

[RobertLos]

Yesterday I bought an extra hard disk for back-up purposes. After solving some problems with grub (the sequence of /dev/sd? devices changed) I was able to partition the new disk with a small ntfs primary partition and an 512 GB ext3 partition in the extended partition.

fdisk -l shows following:

Disk /dev/sda: 200.0 GB, 200049647616 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 24321 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xfd7011cd

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 17947 144159246 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 17948 24321 51199155 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5 17948 24321 51199123+ 7 HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/sdb: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0008789c

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 1 60424 485355748+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdb2 60425 60801 3028252+ f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sdb5 60425 60801 3028221 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Disk /dev/sdc: 640.1 GB, 640135028736 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 77825 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0006c1cd

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdc1 1 10199 81923436 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sdc2 10200 77825 543205845 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sdc5 10200 77825 543205813+ 83 Linux

Disk /dev/sdd: 122.9 GB, 122942324736 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14946 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0d480d48

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdd1 * 1 5979 48026286 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sdd2 5980 14946 72027427+ f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sdd5 5980 14946 72027396 7 HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/sde: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xd4c9099d

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sde1 1 47201 379142001 7 HPFS/NTFS

Looks like a lot of disks. The new disk is /dev/sdc.

I added a mountpoint /var2 and added the following line in /etc/fstab

/dev/sdc1 /media/winxp_e ntfs-3g rw,users,gid=users,umask=0002,nls=utf8 0 0
/dev/sdc5 /var2 ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
/dev/hdc /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0

sudo mount /dev/sdc5 tells
mount: /dev/sdc5 already mounted or /var2 busy
umount /dev/sdc5 says umount: /dev/sdc5 is not mounted (according to mtab)

gparted suddenly shows a lot of /dev/mapper devices.

When booting in windows-XP I can see the new drive and use the ntfs partition.

all disks can not be mounted except the boot disk (/dev/sdb1)

any ideas?

I upgrade from 5.04 to 9.04 with all in between steps.

thanks

[Mark Phelps]

Know it may sound silly, but would change the /var2 mount to a /media mount.

Also, would remove the sdc5 line from fstab and manually mount sdc5 without the errors option. It may be remounting the partition over and over, encountering errors each time, and remounting it again. At least this way, if there are errors, you will see the messages in the terminal.

[RobertLos]

Dear Mark,

Thanks for answering. I kind of sorted things out. It does not matter where the mount point is. /media is used for either windows formated ntfs or FAT formatted drives or for removable media. You can of course use this for a new hard disk. Since I use backup-manager and the new disk is internally installed I figured that /var2 would be a good position since I add a directory /vars/archives there so new backups would land (after changing backup-manager.conf) on a different disk.

The problem was caused by the software raid functionality. It looks like the new disk was treated as a raid device and therefore unmountable for other linux processes, including mounting by hand. Removing mdadm and libdmraid solved the problem.

Did cost me some time to figure out however. The boot process is now greatly sped up.

Thanks

Robert