Troubleshooting the “device is busy” Error Attempting to umount a Disk

Jul 9th, 2008 | linux | No Comments

Before attempting to dismount a filesystem, it must be inactive. If "any user" has one of the filesystem's directories as their current directory or has any file within the filesystem open, you will receive an error message, like the one below, when attempting to unmount the filesystem:

  # umount /dev/dsk/c0t2d0s7
  umount: /dev/dsk/c0t2d0s7: device is busy

Well, the

fuser

command to the rescue. The

fuser

command may be used to determine which files or directories within a filesystem are currently in use and to identify the processes and users that are using them.

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Why is My Root File System Read-Only?

Jul 9th, 2008 | bash, linux, unix | No Comments

To understand how you got into this state, see EXT2-fs: warning: mounting unchecked file system.

Remount it. If /etc/fstab is correct, you can simply type:

# mount -n -o remount /

If /etc/fstab is wrong, you must give the device name and possibly the type, too: e.g.

# mount -n -o remount -t ext2 /dev/hda2 /