umount /mnt/gentoo : device is busy - troubleshooting

needlern1

help is needed. I'm in the final throes of installation

, but can not get /mnt/gentoo unmounted

I ran 'etc-update', 'exit', cd'd to /, and:

# umount /mnt/gentoo/boot
# umount /mnt/gentoo/proc
# umount /mnt/gentoo/dev
(/dev did not unmount, it had not been mounted)
# umount /mnt/gentoo
umount /mnt/gentoo : device is busy

I also had two other terminals open, F2 and F3, when I did my 'umount's. After reading some forum posts on the topic, I closed them. They each now just show the 'cdimage login: _' .

I also did a '^d' (logout) and logged back in (I had set a root passwd). 'Mount' shows:

Larde · Posted: Fri Feb 14, 2003 12:41 am Post subject:

Probably some background process you started while being chrooted to /mnt/gentoo. Perhaps you can find out the process number using fuser /mnt/gentoo and kill that process.

Hth,
Larde.
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needlern1 · Posted: Fri Feb 14, 2003 2:53 am Post subject:

Thank your Larde. The output does not look promising?

Woland · Posted: Fri Feb 14, 2003 3:35 am Post subject:

I had the same prolem, and just maunally re-booted. I know this is a bad thing but if you sync first, you should not get any corruptions in your file system. --And durning the install, your root file system is in RAM anyway, so its not going to be around to get corrupted. Worst come to worst, you can always reboot again with the install CD and fsck away. I know this is not an elegant solution, but I am not sure that this is a problem that you want to waste too much time on.

rtn · Guru Joined: 15 Nov 2002 Posts: 427

Try unmounting /mnt/gentoo/mnt/.init.d

--rtn

DarkJedi9 · Apprentice Joined: 28 Oct 2002 Posts: 204

Pretty much everytime I've installed Gentoo this has happened. I've always just crossed my fingers and rebooted. It's never caused a problem.

needlern1 · Posted: Sat Feb 15, 2003 10:50 am Post subject:

Thanks to all for the tips. I wound up doing a sync (per Woland) and rebooted, as rtn hadn't posted at that time. It rebooted successfully, but with numerous modules broken.

I then rebuilt my kernel and modules a couple of times and copied the bzImage to what I finally remembered was my unmounted /boot partition. I'm not used to having an unmounted /boot. Once I copied bzImage to my mounted /boot (I'm pointing this out as there must be countless numbers of people who may repeat just what I've gone through) all was well in paradise

. Bill

Woland · Posted: Sat Feb 15, 2003 6:47 pm Post subject:

The unmounted boot threw me at first too, & I even considered changing that. Then I realized, that on more than one occasion, it kept me from contributing here:
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=17076&highlight=dumb+mistakes
and I just kept it the way it was.

torque2k · n00b Joined: 08 Aug 2002 Posts: 29 Location: MI

gilesjuk · Posted: Sat Feb 22, 2003 8:48 pm Post subject: Re: This works.

Quite often you're in the directory that is being unmounted, you just need to cd /

Or you've become superuser from a normal user account and that user is still in that dir.

CTRL D or exit to reverse the SU and cd / fixes that.
(not applicable in this case, but useful to know).

Woland · Posted: Sat Feb 22, 2003 11:43 pm Post subject:

In this case you have a (virtual) file system mounted on a file system which you are trying to unmount. So running the mount command by itself should show you what is mounted where.

As for being in a directory, yes, that is usullay a problem, except if you are running a "shutdown" script, this shouldn't matter---shutdown sends a kill signal to all running processes, including the shells.

padma · n00b Joined: 23 Feb 2003 Posts: 2 Location: St. Louis

I had the same problem while installing using a GRP live cd.
The install directions don't mention umounting the GRP directory, as soon as I umounted it all was fine.