Hello,
I am using Fedora Core 5 and my Linux kernel no. is 2.6.15.2054_FC5smp. I have been using this system for months now and have never had any problems. However, one day my USB device didn't mount when I plugged it in. I tried mounting it with the commands:
mkdir /media/disk
mount /dev/sda /media/disk
and got the error message:
mount: /dev/sda already mounted or /media/disk busy
I have Googled this problem and many others seem to have similar issues, but none of the solutions provided worked for me. I thought that maybe the problem was caused by a recent install of Amarok, so I uninstalled it w/out success.
Thanks,
crimbo

Hi

That error means that somebody or something is actually accessing the USB drive already,try unmounting it first.or if it is a shared drive,eg file server then a remote machine is accessing the drive.

also do the following

# lsusb

It should give you an output of your attached USB devices

# cd /dev; ls -al sd*

This will give you an output of the attached serial devices, should be something like sda,sda1,sdb,sdb1 etc...

# mount /dev/sda1 /media/usbdisk

This should mount it

I tried unmounting the device with "umount /dev/sda" but it gave the following error message:
umount: /dev/sda is not mounted (according to mtab)
What is mtab? Is it possible that mtab is messing up the mount?
The contents of the /etc/mtab file is:
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00 / ext3 rw 0 0
proc /proc proc rw 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs rw 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts rw,gid=5,mode=620 0 0
/dev/sda2 /boot ext3 rw 0 0
tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs rw 0 0
none /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc binfmt_misc rw 0 0
sunrpc /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs rpc_pipefs rw 0 0
automount(pid2248) /net autofs rw,fd=4,pgrp=2248,minproto=2,maxproto=4 0 0

I feel stupid now I was using the wrong device driver. I was using /dev/sda when I should have been using /dev/sdc! Dunno why it stopped automounting in the first place but at least its working now.
Thanks