Can't mount /dev/hda3, now I'm '/home'less!

[Michael R. Head]

On my desktop machine (which is running 7.10, but has been upgraded
along the way with devel releases), I've taken to keeping /home on a
separate partition (/dev/hda3) so I can take my data with me if I desire
to do a clean install. This has worked well for several years now.

Until today!

I booted into Ubuntu for the first time in a while (usually I just use
my laptop), but I got some errors when logging in from gdm, so I logged
in with a terminal and got this dreaded error:

Could not chdir to home directory /home/burner: No such file or
directory

I found that /dev/hda3 was not mounted to /home
burner at firestorm:/$ mount |grep home
burner at firestorm:/$ mount |grep hda3

So I attempted to mount it manually:
burner at firestorm:/$ sudo mount /dev/hda3 /home/
mount: /dev/hda3 already mounted or /home/ busy

No luck. What's weird here is that /dev/hda3 was not mounted, and if I
check for open files on /home, it's clear:
burner at firestorm:/$ sudo lsof |grep home
burner at firestorm:/$ 

What's more, I can't mount /dev/hda3 anywhere!

burner at firestorm:/$ sudo mkdir /test-mount
burner at firestorm:/$ sudo mount /dev/hda3 /test-mount/
mount: /dev/hda3 already mounted or /test-mount/ busy

/dev/hda3 is reiserfs, and I have done a "sudo fsck /dev/hda3".
Everything looked fine when I did that.


Anyone got a suggestion?

-- 
Michael R. Head <burner at suppressingfire.org>
http://picasaweb.google.com/demiri.head.wedding
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