in sles10, mounting a spare disk partition,

[John Spies]

Hello,

On an itanium 7640 server running sles10, we have used dd to copy the root and boot partitions to partitions on a spare disk. when I try to mount one of those partitions with the command mount -t reirserfs /dev/sdad5 /mnt, I get the message that the device is busy. What software process is causing this partition to appear busy, or what am I missing. ?

Thanks for any help.

John

[Stefan Stechemesser]

Hi John,

I would recomend to run lsof on the device file to see what processes have the device open.
If you have copied to block devices instead of raw devices, than it may be that there is still data in the buffer cache that could not be flushed (maybe due to hardware problems ?).

By the way, ther is a little bit risk in what you do. When copying a whole disk with dd, then you make an exact copy of that disk. This means that f.e. that the EFI GUIDs are identical which may lead to boot problems.
Also some filesystems may be mounted not by using the /dev/sdad5 device file but some other identifiers that you also copied.
=> maybe you disk was mounted instead of the original root disk ?

I hope you know what you do ;-)

best regards

Stefan

[John Spies]

Thanks Stefan, Yes, the reason I want to mount the partition is so I can edit /etc/fstab, and /etc/elilo.conf to insert the serial numbers of the second disk, in hopes that it will be a usable backup disk.

Thanks for the suggestion of lsof.

John