umount - device is busy

Moebius · 08-22-2004, 04:36 AM

Quite often when I try to umount a drive (my iPod for instance) it get an error saying it's busy. But it's quite clearly not. There are no applications open that are using it and I'm not in that drive in a shell. Is there a way to see what is keeping that device busy? I get this error with a number of different hard drives. Firewire and USB.

Thanks!

david_ross · 08-22-2004, 04:46 AM

You could try using lsof. I have noticed in the past that some applications such as konqueror appear to stop you unmounting partitions while they are running.

What proccesses are running when you try to unount:
ps -ef

amosf · 08-22-2004, 06:27 AM

try fuser on the mounted device... man fuser for details.

Moebius · 08-23-2004, 04:10 AM

thanks amosf. That fuser app is helpful! It turned out that famd was keeping those drives busy for some reason. So I stopped the server, umounted the drives and restarted the service.

Thanks for the help.

amosf · 08-23-2004, 05:19 AM

It's nearly always fam... it's the app that auto updates the file manager... Usually

fuser -k /device

will kill the fam process that is stopping you...

Moebius · 08-29-2004, 02:22 PM

OK I'm having a new problem now where a drive isn't umounting even if fuser says there are no processed using it.

root@moebius /home/zac # umount /mnt/movies
umount: /mnt/movies: device is busy
umount: /mnt/movies: device is busy
root@moebius /home/zac # fuser -v /mnt/movies

USER PID ACCESS COMMAND
/mnt/movies root kernel mount /mnt/movies

any ideas here?

Not now, John! · 08-29-2004, 03:12 PM

I always get that error message when I had been navigating some (zip, tar...) archive with KDE Konqueror. Apparently Konqueror caches files from that archive.
Also, same error message displays when I'm trying umount /mnt/disk, and my working directory is /mnt/disk.

I'm not sure what's causing problem to you.
It could be some caching thing.
Try browsing root directory of that disk and hit F5 (Refresh).
Do you still get same message?

mikedeatworld · 08-29-2004, 07:16 PM

Did you get your iPod to work with Linux?

Moebius · 08-29-2004, 07:19 PM

mikedeatworld, yes i got my iPod working.

chozas · 08-30-2004, 04:19 AM

Have you tried to run fuser but with the option -m so it can give you the pid of the process using the device and then search it using ps -A

streamy · 09-01-2004, 02:53 PM

The Konqueror can (will) block umounts when it is configured to keep one or more instances preloaded. Go to Konq settings, performance, and set instances to keep preloaded to 0.

ajosshi · 09-09-2004, 02:10 AM

I had encountered the same problem, and the "-l" option resolved the problem.

umount /mnt/movies -l

Please refer to the man-page of the umount for more detail.

SteveGodfrey · 09-09-2004, 07:33 AM

/usr/sbin/lsof +D /mnt/hdb

gives some useful info....

melao · 10-16-2004, 06:40 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Moebius
mikedeatworld, yes i got my iPod working.

Can you tell me how ? I just couldn't mount it!

Thanks.

Steel_J · 12-06-2004, 11:26 PM

Hello people!

I too use to have problems unmounting partitions for external USB and Firewire drives, samba partitions and NFS partitions and Floppy's and even CD players for god sakes.

Anyhow, I wrote a little script that fixes it.

The "umount" problems are intermittent so most of the time everything works ok, but for those times when it does not here is my easy solution and it as nothing to do with using fuser or killing obscure processes.

Here is my script:

Code:

#!/bin/bash

# This script is used to stop the xinetd service and restart it 

/etc/rc.d/init.d/xinetd stop

/etc/rc.d/init.d/xinetd start

exit

Save it in you favorite editor as "restart_xinetd" and as root, copy that script in your /USR/BIN directory.

Make sure while still in root to change it's permissions in console like so: chmod +rx restart_xinetd

Now whenever you get the dreaded " Device busy" error while unmounting, just open up a console, login as root (su) and type "restart_xinetd".

You'll be able to unmount anything you want after that and you wont kill any necessary processes or need to reboot.

This is a good workaround until a real fix is found for this bug on many distros.