SOLVED: Second hard disk not mounting anymore

[webheadjunky]

Something strange has happened in last few days
I have had 2 hard disks for several months

But my home folder now has 2 gobbledygook files of 0B with symbols which I can't delete even as root as they "don't exist" yet I can see them

The dolphin shortcut I had to my second hard disk no longer works and I get a message that it no longer exists

Here's my fstab file which I have not touched since last November:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid -o value -s UUID' to print the universally unique identifier
# for a device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name
# devices that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
# / was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=9d2a6c9a-d440-40c3-b0a0-3b90090cf78e / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1
# swap was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=1b0a8603-169e-4ef9-8d00-d4adf9ea1445 none swap sw 0 0
# /dev/sr0 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0
# /dev/sr1 /media/cdrom1 udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto rw,user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0
/dev/sdb1 /media/Archive ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 0

Archive is the partition on my second harddisk sdb1


Here's the output from df:

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 28288680 14657560 12194108 55% /
udev 1030912 304 1030608 1% /dev
none 1030912 0 1030912 0% /dev/shm
none 1030912 220 1030692 1% /var/run
none 1030912 0 1030912 0% /var/lock
none 1030912 0 1030912 0% /lib/init/rw



Yet I can see the second disk no problem in gparted and everything appears to be in order

Just can't access it or see it in Dolphin or via other applications

Any ideas?

Cheers

Raaj

[askrieger]

Re: Second hard disk not mounting anymore

I'm not sure I understand your setup. Where is your /home directory tree? Is it on /dev/sda or on /dev/sdb? If /home is on the same disk as "/", is it on the same partition? It seems to be from what you show. What happens if you try to mount /dev/sdb1 from the command line?

[webheadjunky]

Re: Second hard disk not mounting anymore

Hi

Thanks for fast reply!

Home is on sda

sdb is my second hard disk

what command would I use to mount sdb1 from command line?

Thanks again

Raaj

[webheadjunky]

Re: Second hard disk not mounting anymore

Hi

Tried sudo mount and got the error:

mount: mount point /media/Archive does not exist

It's still in fstab though and I have rebooted twice!

Is there anyway to recreate this mount point??

[oshunluvr]

Re: Second hard disk not mounting anymore

Sounds like you have several issues:

"Mount points" are nothing more than directories created to mount a file system to. Fstab entries won't create mount points for you. The terminal command to create a directory is mkdir. The /media location is owned by root, so the command to create /media/Archive is sudo mkdir /media/Archive.

As to why this directory was removed - only you could answer that.

BTW: This isn't windows so rebooting is rarely a solution and is usually unnecessary. The terminal command to mount everything in your fstab is sudo mount -a

The two zero Byte gobbledygook files are likely unrelated to the other issue. I'm guessing that the either have an unprintable character or a space in the filename and that's why you can't delete them. CAREFULLY you can delete them with wildcards or quotes. Again, not being windows - linux "sees" blank spaces as separators or end-of-field markers. If you enclose the name in quotes, it will process it OK.

Example: a file named susan johnson

The terminal delete command rm susan johnson results in;
rm: cannot remove `susan': No such file or directory
rm: cannot remove `johnson': No such file or directory

The terminal delete command rm 'susan johnson' results in the file being deleted. Double quotes work as well. If you've got an unprintable character you can remove them by CAREFULLY using wildcards to replace the unprintable or unusable characters.

[THHHB]

Re: Second hard disk not mounting anymore

I had a similar issue a few days ago- my secondary drive failed to mount at startup and mount -a showed me messages about the device being busy or the mount point not existing. Hadn't touched anything in the config for weeks.

Turned out, the drive had been mounted 32 times and a file system check was in order. The normal behavior of Kubuntu was to pause booting, check the drive and resume booting. This time, it decided it'd rather boot up without mounting the secondary drive and instead show misleading error messages about it. Windows, anyone?
Anyway, the fix was to disable its entry in fstab, reboot, e2fsck the partition, re-enable the entry in fstab and issue mount -a.

You should also consider looking at the SMART-values of the drive, to see whether it's failing on you...

[webheadjunky]

SOLVED: Second hard disk not mounting anymore

Thanks for the feedback guys

As to the question I can only answer... I can confirm I haven't deleted anything!

However I think I now know what's wrong....I tried running the Ubuntu live CD and it told me straightaway that the drive has issues and failure is imminent

Luckily for me it can still mount the drive and let me backup all the data on to an external hard disk (which I am doing as I type this within the Ubuntu live environment) It also shows that I haven't deleted or moved anything by accident

I guess this is one example where Ubuntu has delivered as KDE is not letting me see anything at all

Ubuntu live also let me delete the 2 corrupted files in my home folder

Thanks again for your rapid replies and I am now closing this one off

Cheers

Raaj

[webheadjunky]

Re: Second hard disk not mounting anymore

Anyway, the fix was to disable its entry in fstab, reboot, e2fsck the partition, re-enable the entry in fstab and issue mount -a.





[/quote]

How do I e2fsck the partition?? Will do this whilst I source a replacement drive
Cheers
Raaj