[SOLVED] trouble with /home umount

[billmckinstry]

Hi Forum, I need to umount /home and run fsck from time to time. umount appears to work but when I run fsck a warning appears that I should not run same on a mounted file system. "Mount" shows /home is not mounted. Any ideas what or where I should look for the problem.
Regards, Bill

[Lazydog]

I think the bigger problem is that you need to run fsck.
Why do you believe you need to do this?

[Rubberman]

Basically /home is a mount point, and when you unmount it, the directory is stil there in /root. How are you running fsck? Are you running "fsck /home" or are you running "fsck /dev/sdN" where /dev/sdN is the device that /home resides on, such as "fsck /dev/sdb1"?

[billmckinstry]

The dev where home is mounted is faulty. I have installed a new hdd but have stalled on moving /home to the new /dev. We do not have Linux support in PNG and I am still on a learning curve.

[billmckinstry]

I am running "fsck.ext3 /dev/hdc1 -y" Previf I "service smb stop" "service ldap stop" "umount home" I could run fsck... but now I get the messagethat /home is still mounted yet if I "mount" /home is not listed.

[Rubberman]

There are a couple of ways to handle this. First, I need to know if these are sata or ide drives, secondly whether or not you have enough drive slots in the chassis to install the new drive without removing the faulty one, and thirdly what distribution/version of RHEL/Fedora/CentOS you are using.

[billmckinstry]

ide drives, slots full but I have installed new drive and partitioned etc. Just the copy of /home and update of mount file that needs to be done. Clarkconnect 4.1 is based on rhel 4.

[Rubberman]

ide drives, slots full but I have installed new drive and partitioned etc. Just the copy of /home and update of mount file that needs to be done. Clarkconnect 4.1 is based on rhel 4.

Ok. So it is using the old device designators, /dev/hda instead of /dev/sda etc. What I think you are saying is that you have both the old drive that has /home and the new drive that you want to put /home installed on the system right now? If that is the case, then boot the system, log in as root, and make sure they are both unmounted. Then do this:

1. Format new drive partition with file system type you want (ext2, ext3, whatever), if you haven't already done this.
2. Manually mount the new partition using /home as the mount point (the empty directory /home for the mount point should already be there) - assuming /home is /dev/hda1: mount /dev/hda1 /home
3. Create a temporary mount point for the old data (something like /mnt/old-home): mkdir /mnt/old-home as an example.
4. Manually mount the old drive/partition on the temporary mount point created in step 3 above. Assuming old partition is /dev/hdb1: mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt/old-home
5. Copy the old data to the new /home directory: cp -rfp /mnt/old-home/* /home
6. Unmount /mnt/old-home: umount /mnt/old-home
7. Edit /etc/fstab and change the entry for /home to the new device id, if it has changed.

The -rfp option to the cp command will copy recursively (-r) and preserving mode+ownership+timestamp data on the files (-p). In this case, since you are not overwriting old data, the -f (force removal) option is unnecessary. I just include it as a precaution.

[billmckinstry]

Thanks Rubberman, Change over to new hdd appears to be working ok.