Re: ghost partition

[Haines Brown <haines@histomat.net>]

I had been inserting a sequence of USB keys to see what was on them, and
pretty sure the sde1 interface was used at some point. But no keys are
inserted at present. I also just did a cross installation onto an
attached hard disk and so its directories were mounted locally on /mnt
and I had chroot'ed into its root directory. I suspect this was close in
time to when my root partition became filled. I unmounted these
partitions and I closed the chroot terminal. To avoid confusion I should
note that in what follows, my currently running disk is /dev/sdb, while
the new cross installation was to /dev/sda. That is, /dev/sda is the
newer disk. I should also note that /home, /usr, /var and /tmp
partitions are broken out.

  $ cat /proc/mounts
  rootfs / rootfs rw 0 0
  sysfs /sys sysfs rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime 0 0
  proc /proc proc rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime 0 0
  udev /dev devtmpfs rw,relatime,size=10240k,nr_inodes=188865,mode=755 0 0
  devpts /dev/pts devpts rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,gid=5,mode=620,ptmxmode=000 0 0
  tmpfs /run tmpfs rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,size=1647748k,mode=755 0 0
  /dev/disk/by-uuid/b0673fe5-e6b2-42a5-9121-5fcf32b7135d / \
        ext4 rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro,user_xattr,barrier=1,data=ordered 0 0
  tmpfs /run/lock tmpfs rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,size=5120k 0 0
  tmpfs /run/shm tmpfs rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,size=9545360k 0 0
  /dev/sdb5 /home ext4 rw,relatime,user_xattr,barrier=1,data=ordered 0 0
  ...

  $ ls -la /sys/block/sde
  lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 May  9 05:30 /sys/block/sde ->
  ../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb1/1-3/1-3.3/1-3.3:1.0/host7/target7:0:0/ \
        7:0:0:1/block/sde

  This is similar to the return from other interfaces.

  # blockdev --report /dev/sde
  RO    RA   SSZ   BSZ   StartSec            Size   Device
  rw   256   512  4096          0               0   /dev/sde

  # blockdev --report /dev/sde1
  RO    RA   SSZ   BSZ   StartSec            Size   Device
  blockdev: cannot open /dev/sde1: No such file or directory

  # grep sde1 /var/log/dmesg
  [nothing]

Juergen suggested deleting /dev/sde1 it after backing it up. That was my
first inclination, but kinda hard to do if /dev/sde1 is not visible. I
also considered just rebooting, but thought best to find out what the
problem is, and who knows I might not be able to boot. I have a second
bootable disk on the machine that automatically mounts the partitions on
my problematic drive on /mnt/debian/...., and so I can boot it and
access the current drive's partitions.

Haines