Hi Linux Community,

I have various drives and partitions that I have been mounting through fstab, but sometimes I had to do it manually, but now, I can't get them to mount at all.

At first I thought it might be a disk failure, but booting to a Live CD shows all the drives working fine.

when the entries are added into fstab, $mount -l shows them as mounted to their relevant mount points, but the data does't show in either terminal or dolphin?

Typing $umount /dev/drive always returns /dev/drive not mounted.

When I comment out the entries in fstab and reboot and try a manual mount, I always get /dev/drive already mounted or /mount/point busy. $mount -l does not show any mount entry points for the drive.

My /home/user partition is now full as I can't save data on the other drives, so I don't know if this is an issue.

Also I use a mixture of encrypted partitions and non encrypted partitions, but this wasn't an issue before.

Checking some of the logs didn't show any errors. The problem seemed to start when gdd was saving data to a partition mount point I thought was mounted but wasn't. I have since removed that data. and even created a new mount point.

Tried all avenues I know of and can't find anything in other forums that help. Is there a way to clear the drive cache?

Thanks in advance

What version are you running?

I find weird that you "had to mount manually" sometimes.

Just a wild guess, couldn't it have something to do with that new crazy UID thing? Perhaps, for some reason, they've changed. (I don't know, but I think they'd change if you moved the hdds to different computers or even switched cables). You could try to assign them labels and set fstab to mount them through labels rather than UIDs. But that's just something from the top of my head, the first thing I'd think to do if something like that happened to me, if I used UIDs instead of labels -- no guarantee at all that it would work. And there's always that infinitesimal chance that it would actually ruin everything because of some incredible coincidence...

I recall (I guess I do) having read somewhere that now the use of actual device names is deprecated or something like that.

I do not know why the uuid would change if you moved a drive. The do not move if you move a partition on a drive. This makes life very easy if you delete and add partitions as you do not have to edit the fstab file.

We really need to know what version you are using.

As far as checking the uuid just run;
and get a list. Check it against your fstab file.

I'm using UUID's in my fstab, I thought that was the one constant I could rely on, I can try making Labels and reporting the results.

Version of what? I'm using Kubuntu 10.04 x64

10.04 Ubuntu had some problems with this issue in testing. I thought it was straightened out. Perhaps the Kubuntu side of things is still a little screwy.

Before you change things in your fstab file it would be a good idea to file a bug. Apport picks up (usually) the relevant files and logs and send them with the report so having the fstab as it is would be a good idea.