Difference between revisions of "Disk mounting"

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tail -n 1 /mnt/disk_image_loop/log.log
 
tail -n 1 /mnt/disk_image_loop/log.log
 
ls -l /proc/*/root | grep /mnt/disk_image_loop
 
ls -l /proc/*/root | grep /mnt/disk_image_loop
 +
</pre>
 +
This searching for chooted processes can be handy. Here is an alias for listing chrooted processes.
 +
<pre>
 +
alias lschroot='ls -l /proc/*/root | grep -v "\-[>] /$"'
 
</pre>
 
</pre>
  

Revision as of 15:38, 27 May 2014


Nested mounts cause error, "umount: foo : device is busy." when umounting parent directory

You can't seem unmount a filesystem. You see something like this:

# umount /mnt/disk_image_loop
umount: /mnt/disk_image_loop: device is busy.
        (In some cases useful info about processes that use
         the device is found by lsof(8) or fuser(1))

You confirm that no terminal windows have a shell set to that working directory. You then find that fuser -m /mnt/disk_image_loop and lsof -n -N | grep disk_image_loop give no useful information. Checking losetup you see that a loopback device to associated with the mount point.

# losetup --all
/dev/loop0: [fc00]:25953690 (/var/disk-images/sid.img)

This can happen with nested mounts. When checking mount it is easy to overlook additional mounts inside your mounted filesystem. For example, if you are building a root filesystem you might have /var/disk-images/sid.img mounted on /mnt/disk_image_loop then not notice that you have have additional proc and devpts filesystems mounted on directories under /mnt/disk_image_loop. You must unmount these filesystems before you can unmount /mnt/disk_image_loop.

/dev/sda1 on / type ext4 (rw,noatime,errors=remount-ro)
proc on /proc type proc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
udev on /dev type tmpfs (rw,mode=0755)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=620)
/var/disk-images/sid.img on /mnt/disk_image_loop type ext3 (rw)
/proc on /mnt/disk_image_loop type none (rw,bind)
devpts on /mnt/disk_image_loop type devpts (rw)

additional cause of "device is busy" error during umount

This error can happen if the mounted filesystem was chrooted and a daemon process was started in the chroot environment. Even if you started the daemon in a chrooted shell and then exited the shell the daemon keeps running in the chrooted environment. You can demonstrate this by mounting a root filesystem and chrooting into it and then running a trivial little bash daemon.

mount /var/disk-images/sid.img /mnt/disk_image_loop
mount -o loop /var/disk-images/sid.img /mnt/disk_image_loop
chroot /mnt/disk_image_loop /bin/bash
( ( while true; do date >> /log.log; sleep 1; done ) & ) &
exit
tail -n 1 /mnt/disk_image_loop/log.log
sleep 2
tail -n 1 /mnt/disk_image_loop/log.log
ls -l /proc/*/root | grep /mnt/disk_image_loop

This searching for chooted processes can be handy. Here is an alias for listing chrooted processes.

alias lschroot='ls -l /proc/*/root | grep -v "\-[>] /$"'

fdisk

This will list all the disks that Linux sees. This will not show loop devices. See `losetup` example for more information:

fdisk -l

losetup

Convert a VMWare flat split image disk set to a raw disk image
cat linux-server-f001.vmdk linux-server-f002.vmdk linux-server-f003.vmdk > linux-server.img
Find the start of partitions
fdisk -l -u linux-server.img
First partition usually starts at block 63. Each block is usually 512 bytes. Offset is therefore
echo $((63*512))
Find the start of each partition down to the exact offset byte (easier than `fdisk`)
parted linux-server.img unit b print
List the next available loopback device
losetup -f
Attach loopback to a partition offset inside of a disk image
losetup -o $((63*512)) /dev/loop0 linux-server.img
Create a mount point
mkdir -p /media/adhoc
Mount the partition
mount /dev/loop0 /media/adhoc
Unmount the partition before cleaning up loop device
umount /media/adhoc
Cleanup the loop device
losetup -d /dev/loop0

losetup -- mount individual partitions in a whole disk image

If you have a while disk image and you want to mount partitions inside that image then use `losetup` to create a loopback device for the image. For example, say you copied an entire disk using `dd` like this:

dd if=/dev/sda of=disk.img

You can later create a loop device for it and see its partitions with `fdisk` and mount those partitions individually with `mount`. Note that `fdisk -l` does not normally show loop devices. You must add an explicit path to the loop device that you want to list.

losetup /dev/loop0 disk.img
fdisk -l /dev/loop0

The previous example assumed that /dev/loop0 was free. You can you the '-f' option to automatically find a free loop device. In this example we first use the '-f' option to associate the image file with the next available loop device; then we use the '-j' option to see what loop device was associated with the file:

losetup -f disk.img
losetup -j disk.img

mounting partitions inside a disk image without loop device

It is also possible to mount partitions inside a disk image file directly with `mount` using the 'offset' option, but I have not had luck with this.

mount -o loop,ro,offset=1025 disk.img /media/adhoc

Disk recovery

Use `dd_rhelp`. This is a wrapper around `dd_rescue` that makes it easier to use.