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

[Owen Townend]

On Thu, 2007-12-20 at 07:12 -0500, Michael R. Head wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-12-20 at 06:33 -0500, Seth Hasani wrote:
> > On Dec 19, 2007 5:36 PM, Michael R. Head <burner at suppressingfire.org> wrote:
> > 
> > > 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?
> > 
> > Any hardware changes? 
> 
> Nope... well, I have a new monitor attached to it.
> 
> > Added another drive or an IDE card maybe? Have
> > you tried mounting via UUID? This mounts the partition you're
> > intending explicitly even if the devfs path (/dev/hd# or /dev/sd#)
> > changes. If that's the case, its possible /dev/hda3 is indeed an empty
> > partition. There were some changes to pata drivers a while back, Im
> > not sure if this is your problem but it could have some relevance.
> 
> I can successfully mount the partition when I boot with a 7.10 live CD.
> It's just the installed Ubuntu image that's giving me trouble.
> 
> > Seth
> > 

Hey,
  One thing you can try is using UUID lines in fstab instead of /dev
addresses. Use vol_id to find the UUID and then the fstab line looks
something like this:

# Home partition, was /dev/hda2
UUID=aadbde44-75cb-4fae-3dad-cf2a42d0be3d /home               ext3
defaults,errors=remount-ro 0       1

  This should make it impervious to partitions moving around /dev as
happens on occasion when adding new drives or fiddling in BIOS.

cheers,
Owen.