Problem mounting drives

[Bewe]

Hi!

I have a problem with mounting which seams kind of random, during bootup i get the following error included below (it always occurs when i do a "cold" boot, but only randomly when I do a reboot)

boot.log:

fsck from util-linux-ng 2.17.2
/dev/sda1: clean, 196990/19456000 files, 2176757/77815040 blocks
mount: /dev/sda1 already mounted or /media/Public busy
mount: according to mtab, /dev/sda1 is mounted on /
mountall: mount /media/Public [605] terminated with status 32
mountall: Filesystem could not be mounted: /media/Public
init: ureadahead-other main process (771) terminated with status 4

fstab:

proc /proc proc nodev,noexec,nosuid 0 0
# / was on /dev/sdb1 during installation
/dev/sdb1 / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1
# swap was on /dev/sdb5 during installation
/dev/sdb5 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/sda1 /media/Public ext3 defaults 0 0
/dev/sde1 /media/Private ext3 defaults 0 0
/dev/md0 /media/raid320 auto defaults 0 0

Also, when running fdisk -l i can see that the bootdrive has changed during reboot from sda to sdb (or sdb to sda), without any apparant reason..

Anybody got a suggestion?

[Bewe]

Fixed it by using UUID in fstab!

[_nedR]

edit: Woopsie, didn't see that you already fixed it;
Am a noob myself so my suggestion may not be the solution to the problem, but I'll give it a shot:

According to your boot.log, It seems that your partition at /media/Public is no longer /dev/sda1 (which is actually root). So you have to find the new path for your partition and update your fstab with the correct identifier of /media/Public. According to the man page of fstab, it is always better to use UUID or Label to identify the drive you want to mount. So we'll use your device label to identify your partition.

1. To verify the label of /media/Public is 'Public' itself, (which it probably is) type

ls -l /dev/disk/by-label/Public

If it returns your device name (/dev/sd*), Then we're good to go.

2. Now that you have verified the label of your partition, edit your /etc/fstab using the following command :

gksudo gedit /etc/fstab

Replace the line

/dev/sda1 /media/Public ext3 defaults 0 0

with

LABEL=Public /media/Public ext3 defaults 0 0

Hopefully this should solve the problem.

I hope my explanation is understandable. If not, please ask.

_nedR