I have a Samba share mounted to my desktop and the share dropped at some point during the night. When I try to mount the share this morning I get the message "Failed to stat /data: No such device or address".

When I do an ls -l / I see:
?--------- ? ? ? ? ? data

My guess is the directory I'm using for the mount point is corrupted and I need to recreate the folder to get the share to mount. I'm not quite sure what to try to get rid of the directory. rm -rf won't work as the OS can't seem to stat the file.

Any thoughts on what to try?

Thanks in advance.

My understanding is that samba is what windows computers use to access parts of a linux filesystem on a linux server. If you have a linux client, you would use nfs instead of samba. In any event, could you please give full details on your computer network: how many computers; what OS each computer is running; how each computer access the other computers; etc.

Have you tried a reboot? A nice reboot sometimes works wonders.

Is it possible that the directory in question is off-line? Can you ping the server or navigate to it in your file manager?

xode, Samba works nicely to share directories between Linux machines. As I have a mixed Linux/Windows network, I commonly use Samba; it's the solution of choice in mixed networks.

Thanks Frankbell! A reboot did the trick.

Don't know why I didn't try that sooner....

Always reboot three times!

Source: http://www.thewebsiteisdown.com/

Just kidding. Glad you found your solution.