I want to copy my entire Linux install from a hard disk to a thumbdrive (so I can run my EeePC on flash memory), but I have to leave out /home because it's larger than the thumbdrive can hold and I don't require most of what's in it in the system disk (it'll stay on the hard drive to be accessed as needed).

So I logged in as root, planning to unmount /home (I put it on its own partition) and rsync root on the thumbdrive, but it won't let me unmount saying the device is busy. I tried fuser -u to see what's accessing /dev/sda3, but it returns nothing.

What now?

Try also:
If that doesn't help you solve it, you could apply the pragmatic approach:

(1) Remove /home from /etc/fstab.
(2) Reboot.
(3) Login as root.
(4) Rsync to your hearts content.
(5) Undo your changes to /etc/fstab.
(6) Reboot and pretend nothing happened.

Hi.

No need to umount /home. Just use the --exclude option to rsync, i.e. --exclude /home

Dave

Oh, perfect. Thanks