Mounted drive read-only!

MultiMike · 06-09-2003, 01:34 PM

I'm trying to mount a new hard drive in my slackware box, but when I do, I can't write to it. It's just a 6gig with a single partition which I gave the ext3 filesystem. Something I've noticed is that after 'mkfs'ing and then mounting, when I check the mounts ('mount -l') the type of the mount is listed as 'vfat' and not 'ext3'. Is that where the problem lies?

fancypiper · 06-09-2003, 01:45 PM

That sounds really strange.

Did mkfs -j /dev/hd<XX> give any error messages or results?

What partitioning scheme do you really have?

How to find out: open an x terminal and give these commands and you should get results similar to mine:

Code:

[phil@uilleann phil]$ su -
Password: 
[root@uilleann root]# fdisk /dev/hda -l

Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 4865 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *         1      1217   9772056    c  Win95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/hda2          1217      1229     99855   83  Linux
/dev/hda3          1230      1676   3590527+  83  Linux
/dev/hda4          1677      4865  25615642+   5  Extended
/dev/hda5          1677      1742    530113+  82  Linux swap
/dev/hda6          1743      2189   3590496   83  Linux
/dev/hda7          2190      2636   3590496   83  Linux
/dev/hda8          2637      3751   8956206   83  Linux
/dev/hda9          3752      4865   8948173+  83  Linux
[root@uilleann root]#

Change hda to the actual position the drive is installed.

Mara · 06-09-2003, 01:55 PM

When you run mkfs, do you have the partition mounted? If so, unmount it and try again.

MultiMike · 06-09-2003, 02:10 PM

No, it is not mounted when I mkfs, and here is what I get when I 'fdisk -l' :

Code:

Disk /dev/hdb: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 524 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hdb1             1       524   4208998+  83  Linux

something also interesting is that even though I mkfs, then immediatly mount, here is what I get when I run df :

Code:

Filesystem           1k-blocks      Used Available   Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda2              5967432   3291968   2367420  59% /
/dev/hdb1              4192752   4192752         0 100% /home/dump

Why is the second hd @ 100% usage? Is there something I forgot to do? Starting from scrath, I fdisk and make one partition, then I run 'mkfs -t ext2 -j /dev/hdb1' to format it. All that's left is mount it with 'mount /dev/hdb1 /home/dump' , right?

0x4B · 06-09-2003, 02:19 PM

I can't decide if its a different tool or not, but mkfs.ext2/mkfs.ext3 and mke2fs seem to be. try using mke2fs with the -j option and see if it does anything differently. (you could also use du to see how the disk is being used)

MultiMike · 06-09-2003, 02:52 PM

mke2fs yeilded no difference. Here is my mount -l

Code:

/dev/hda2 on / type ext3 (rw) []
none on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
none on /proc type proc (rw)
/dev/hdb1 on /home/dump type vfat (rw) []

fancypiper · 06-09-2003, 03:09 PM

Try filling the drive (unmounted) with zeros to completely wipe it and then fdisk and mkfs.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdb

I apparently had traces of fat32 that interfered with one version of mkfs that doing that fixed.

MultiMike · 06-09-2003, 04:08 PM

Thank you piper! That fixed my problem. So what happened exactly? fdisking and making a new partition didn't actually wipe out the old fat filesystem?

fancypiper · 06-09-2003, 04:21 PM

Apparently not. It may have been a particular version of mkfs that didn't do quite right, but since I experienced it, hat is my first step automatically if any drive has ever been contaminated with the Microsoft virus. You never know how sneaky they can be...