Problem unmounting external hard drive

[Mark Stewart]

I have an HP J210 with two external harddrives attached which I am migrating to another workstation(phasing out the 210). I went to unmount the harddrives and the first unmounting with no problem. The second however returns the error that the device is busy. I tried unmounting using SAM and umount. I thought to use umount -f , but the -f switch is not supported on this HP-UX version. Any suggestions? Should I just down the machine and take it off without unmounting first?

[Colin Topliss]

If you're phasing your J-Class out, just shut it down and disconnect the drives. The shutdown process will take care of unmounting for you.

[Paul Sperry · Accepted solution]

Someone or some process is accessing the files on the external drive. Use fuser or lsof to find out which processes is accessing the files the kill them. You should then be able to unmount the drive. But if you just shutdown the system that would be alot eaiser.
That is yes you can shutdown without unmounting first.

[Gary Yu]

You may try 'fuser -ck /mount_point' first, then run the umount, or use lsof to check which process is accessing the file system and stop them. if this doesn't work, then you need to bring the sever to single user mode.

Gary

[Michael Duthie]

Mark,

1st question is do you wish to retain the data ?

2nd Are you using LVM ?


If yes to both you should export the volume group(s) and import on the new system.

[Michael Duthie]

Mark,



1st question is do you wish to retain the data ?

2nd are any of these the boot disk ?

3nd Are you using LVM ?

[Mark Stewart]

I'll try the fuser.. I forgot about doing that to check for processes accessing the drive.

To answer the other questions, yes, I plan to keep the data. This drive is not the boot drive and it wasn't setup using the LVM to my knowledge. Does that change anything?

[Michael Duthie]

If the whole disk is mounted as a filesystem, then shut the system down and disconnect the drives.

Reconnect on the new server, take note of the new device files and then mount.

Not a good idea to disconnect & reconnect with an active SCSI bus. The SCSI fuse has a habit of popping.