Mysterious Unmounts
Thad Nielsen
paroikos at myrealbox.com
Sun Apr 30 18:05:52 UTC 2006
Charles R. Dennett [dennett at rochester.rr.com] wrote:
> I'm running FC5 and earlier this week one of the two hard drives in my
> system died. It was the disk with FC5 on it. I bought a new disk,
> installed it and reinstalled FC5. (Previously, I had done upgrade
> installations starting with RH9->FC3->FC4->FC5 so this was really the
> first time I had done a clean FC5 install.) I then did a "yum update".
>
> I logged in as my normal non-root user and su'ed to root. As I was
> logged in as root and pulling various files from my backups to get my
> web server, mail server and other tools running again I happened to
> notice that some disk partitions were no longer mounted. The disk I
> replaced contains partitions mounted on /, /boot, /var, /space1 and a 1
> GB swap partition. /boot and /space1 were missing. I remounted them.
> Some time later I noticed the same thing. I remounted them. This kept
> happening. Sometimes the /home partition from the second disk would be
> missing. This seemed to be happening whenever root logged off or I
> exited the kyum (a GUI for yum) application. I was using that to add
> additional packages I needed. The / and /var partitions never
> disappeared. It looked like any partition with no open files were being
> unmounted.
>
> Here's what I did to try to figure out what was happening. I renamed
> /bin/umount to /bin/umount-real. I then wrote a quick script for
> /bin/umount that would append to a file the time and date and the output
> from "ps -ef". Then it would call /bin/umount-real with whatever
> arguments had been passed to it. I forced the problem to happen again
> and then looked at the file my script had written. I caught a umount
> from the ps output. Here are the entries tracking parent and child PIDs
> back to the hald daemon:
>
>
> 68 1850 1 0 Apr28 ? 00:00:03 hald
> root 1851 1850 0 Apr28 ? 00:00:00 hald-runner
> root 23576 1851 0 22:33 ? 00:00:00 /bin/bash
> /usr/share/hal/scripts/hal-system-storage-unmount
> root 23577 23576 0 22:33 ? 00:00:00 /bin/bash
> /usr/share/hal/scripts/hal-system-storage-unmount
> root 23578 23577 0 22:33 ? 00:00:00 /bin/sh /bin/umount /home
> root 23580 23578 0 22:33 ? 00:00:00 ps -ef
>
> (The 68 as the UID for the first line is because the username is 9
> characters long - haldaemon. Apparently that's a known problem with ps
> and ls when the username is >8 characters.)
>
> I tried googling for this and looking through the archives of this list
> but did not find anything (yet). Does anyone know what is happening
> here and how to fix it? These filesystems are mounted at boot time.
> Why is hal trying to unmount them? They are not removable media.
>
> I'm sure there is more information needed that I have not supplied so
> just ask and I'll respond. If this is a known problem with a known fix,
> just point me in the right direction. If something I've said above is
> not clear, let me know and I'll clarify.
>
> Thanks for any help.
>
> Charlie Dennett
>
Charlie, I cannot help you, except to confirm that my /boot partition
has been found unmounted too. I also am running a clean install
(though updated) of FC5 on i686. You did good research: I think
you're onto something. Hope someone here can help you out.
Thad
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