Here is a good puzzler. I got a second ATAPI disk in my machine that I
was able to partition with fdisk, but cannot mkfs it. It says that the
device is already mounted but when I try to umount it, it says it is not
mounted. the blkid command I ran on the device contradicts with what df
tells me. You can see the commands and outputs below.
I could try booting from a live cd and mkfs the drive, but I am very
curious why this is happening. I have never had this happen to me before.
Tim Legg
engineering:/home/legg# fdisk -l /dev/hdb
Disk /dev/hdb: 200.0 GB, 200049647616 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 24321 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x38ef9d17
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdb1 1 24321 195358401 83 Linux
engineering:/home/legg# mke2fs -j /dev/hdb1
mke2fs 1.41.3 (12-Oct-2008)
/dev/hdb1 is mounted; will not make a filesystem here!
engineering:/home/legg# umount /dev/hdb1
umount: /dev/hdb1: not mounted
engineering:/home/legg# mke2fs -j /dev/hdb1
mke2fs 1.41.3 (12-Oct-2008)
/dev/hdb1 is mounted; will not make a filesystem here!
engineering:/home/legg# blkid /dev/hdb1
/dev/hdb1: TYPE="swap"
engineering:/home/legg# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda2 14G 3.1G 9.6G 25% /
tmpfs 506M 0 506M 0% /lib/init/rw
udev 10M 764K 9.3M 8% /dev
tmpfs 506M 0 506M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/hda3 3.7G 943M 2.6G 27% /home