Where is my 2G? - MC

Brian Astill bastill at adam.com.au
Fri Apr 13 10:59:35 UTC 2007


On Friday 13 April 2007 15:13, Patton Echols wrote:
> >> Interesting, Scott.  For those of us clueless . . . If he
> >> mistakenly tells mc to send to an unmounted partition, what
> >> is the design behavior?

May I share what I have remembered/learned from this thread?
1. /mnt is almost exclusively described in the 
context  "mount /dev/something /mnt/something"
2. This gives the impression that /mnt and its sub-directories are 
special - but they aren't.
3. You can read write copy whatever files to /mnt and its 
sub-directories just as you could with any other directory.
4.  It is only the mount command that makes /mnt special.
5. Mount says "I want to look at a place outside my system.
Make yourself into a door through which I can converse with it."
6. Mount can also say "It's getting crowded in here.  There is 
empty space over there.  Open a door to that empty space, so I 
can store stuff there."
7.  If you dual-boot, you probably have Ubuntu on hda2.  If you 
have a subdirectory called /mnt/hdb7 you can copy files to it if 
you want.  They will be stored as part of hda2's root file 
system, in the normal way.
8. If you want to use part of your second hard drive to store 
stuff, you have to use mount to create the doorway - in this 
case "mount /dev/hdb7 /mnt/hdb7".  Now writing to /mnt/hdb7 will 
result in storing in hdb7 rather than hda2.
9. If you store stuff in /mnt/hdb7 and then later mount /dev/hdb7 
into that subdirectory and store stuff, there is no conflict.  
The first lot will be part of hda2's root filesystem, the second 
will be on hdb7.  If you mount /dev/hdb7 you will see what is 
there.  If you umount /dev/hdb7 you will see what is 
in /mnt/hdb7.  (Hope that is clear.)

My problem resulted from trying to copy 3.9G of /home on hda2 
to /mnt/hdb7on hda2 when there was only 1.8G free on hda2.  That 
overflowed hda2 and screwed things up badly!
If such a situation arose again, I would go into recovery mode and 
do nothing but "shutdown -rF now" to force a fsck on reboot.  
Probably, fsck would require a further reboot and another fsck.
I would see what happened with Ubuntu after that, but probably I 
would need to enter recovery mode again, umount /dev/hdb7 and 
delete the unwanted contents of /mnt/hdb7 (on hda2) there.

Phew!

Hope this helps someone.

-- 
Regards,
Brian




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