Inaccessible drive in Etch
 

Hello to all,

I have had a working setup of Debian etch running for the past month. I shutdown my system last Friday only to boot up today and find that my secondary drive SATA 320GB is not able to mount, because its already in use by the system? I go into maintenance mode and check the /etc/fstab, which hasnt changed. I am not able to manually mount the drive as its still already in use, but check using lsof and fuser, which doesnt report anything in use on the partition. I finally try to run fdisk, just to make sure the drive is accessible, and my partitions are still showing. Nothing in the kern.log or syslog show any strange errors about the drive.

So, I shutdown and move the drive to another controller, and use another cable, and bring the system back up to the same message. I even tried to switch out the drives, but to no avail.

I have already searched on google and the forums here, but unfortunately the fix that is shown doesnt appear to be my issue as I do not have EVMS installed on my system.

Anyone else run into this?

TIA

Eric

I've never run in to something like this, I'm sorry to say.
If you look inside /etc/mtab, after your system's booted up, do you see your drive there?
Could you please post the fstab entry for that drive (and any of its partitions) and your /etc/mtab, please?

Mtab:

/dev/mapper/home-root / ext3 rw,errors=remount-ro 0 0
tmpfs /lib/init/rw tmpfs rw,nosuid,mode=0755 0 0
proc /proc proc rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev 0 0
procbususb /proc/bus/usb usbfs rw 0 0
udev /dev tmpfs rw,mode=0755 0 0
tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs rw,nosuid,nodev 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=620 0 0
/dev/sda1 /boot ext3 rw 0 0
nfsd /proc/fs/nfsd nfsd rw 0 0
rpc_pipefs /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs rpc_pipefs rw 0 0
binfmt_misc /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc binfmt_misc rw 0 0


I do not have the device mapped in /etc/fstab.

The peculiar thing is that I have started with a completely new drive, and I am able to run fdisk to create a new partition, but I am not able to run any sort of filesystem utilities on it, such as mke2fs, e2fsck. I still get the the message that the resource or disk is busy.

What happens when you map the drive in /etc/fstab and reboot? Does it give any error messages about not being able to mount that volume?

I have put in a completely new drive, without a filesystem on it. I can only partition the drive using fdisk. If I try to put a filesystem on it, I get this message:

home:~# mke2fs -j /dev/sdb1
mke2fs 1.40-WIP (14-Nov-2006)
/dev/sdb1 is apparently in use by the system; will not make a filesystem here!

Only fdisk can access it.

home:~# fdisk -l /dev/sdb
Disk /dev/sdb: 320.0 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 38913 312568641 83 Linux

I am not able to mount the drive since I cannot even put a filesystem on it. It seems like a service or something in the kernel is blocking irq resources or locking them on the secondary drive.

Does it show up in the BIOS screen?

BIOS detects the drive correctly


The only messages that I have found that might partain to the problem are from syslog:

localhost kernel: device-mapper: multipath: version 1.0.4 loaded
localhost kernel: device-mapper: multipath round-robin: version 1.0.0 loaded
localhost kernel: device-mapper: table: 254:2: multipath: error getting device
localhost kernel: device-mapper: ioctl: error adding target to table

localhost kernel: ide0: I/O resource 0x1F0-0x1F7 not free.
localhost kernel: ide0: ports already in use, skipping probe
localhost kernel: ide1: I/O resource 0x170-0x177 not free.
localhost kernel: ide1: ports already in use, skipping probe

I have the motherboard set to PATA/SATA compatibility mode and the drives have been accessible, without any changes..so I dont believe that the BIOS is an issue.

I have also turned off acpi and even have the same resouce busy issue in single user mode.

At this point it seems like an unmanaged IRQ issue in the OS.

unaccessable hard drive
 

I would try booting the system with a Live CD, such as Knoppix, and see it you can access the drive this way.

If you can access the drive this way, we know we have a software or configuration problem and not a hardware problem.

Thanks for the suggestions to boot from a Live cd.

So I used a Debian KDE live CD to boot up, and sure enough I am able to access the disk, partition, mount, etc.

I checked udevinfo and the device for the second drive is listed in the database. I think at this point I will just do a fresh install.

Thanks for the help.

Have you tried any kernel parameters for irq routing? As in pci=biosirq or pci=usepirqmask . More in /usr/src/linux/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt or where ever your kernel source is.