/dev/sda1 is not a valid block device
 

RH 7.1 with kernel 2.4.7 i686

after 73 days of uptime, my system froze. I telnet'd into it from another box on my LAN and su'd to root and issued a 'shutdown -r now'.

during the reboot, I was asked to run fsck manually as there was a problem with my /data filesystem which lives by itself on /dev/sda1 (a 4G SCSI drive which can be verified with my Adaptec SCSI utility at boot time).

I have to remove the /dev/sda1...../data...defaults...1 2 line from my /etc/fstab to boot without interaction. then, I try to mount the /data filesystem with the mount /data command (after reinserting the entry in /etc/fstab) and I get '/dev/sda1 is not a valid block device' error.

any help appreciated. all of my data is on this filesystem, and I am mid-stream as far as a backup/recovery deployment...so I fear I am currently in a bad place. thanks in advance.

You left your file type out of this line:
/dev/sda1...../data...defaults...1 2 .
I assume you made a mistake in copying it.

Did you run fsck? Remember that you don't have to mount the partition to check it. Just fsck /dev/sda1.

Try mounting it with this command:
mount -t ext2 /dev/sda1 /data.

I hope this helps. :)

mount -t ext2 /dev/sda1 /data
 

the line from my /etc/fstab is:

/dev/sda1 /data ext2 defaults 1 2

so the mount -t ext2 /dev/sda1 /data command still leaves me with the error:

mount: /dev/sda1 is not a valid block device

fsck info
 

here is the output from an attempted fsck:

fsck /dev/sda1
Parallelizing fsck version 1.19 (13-Jul-2000)
e2fsck 1.19, 13-Jul-2000 for EXT2 FS 0.5b, 95/08/09
fsck.ext2: No such device or address while trying to open /dev/sda1
Possibly non-existent or swap device?

Try fdisk -l /dev/sda and see if sda1 exists.

DOH!
 

well, thanks linuxcool.

your suggestion didn't directly fix my situation, but led me down a path

what happened was fdisk -l /dev/sda did not return any device. so, I powered down my box and re-seated all the cables. my experience has taught me that scsi errors are commonly cable issues. I checked the other devices as well, and realized I had left a CD in my IDE CDROm drive. once I removed the CD, the scsi devices were recognized immediately.

since I have a scsi cd-rw and an IDE cdrom, I'm guessing there is some issue about them both being used at the same time? I do have the scsi drivers compiled as modules, but I digress to another thread.

thanks again.

You're welcome. Glad you found the problem.