That about covers it... I know the events leading up to this situation, but that's not helping me solve it.
Originally I had a 9GB drive on hdd which contained the original emergency SuSE installation after I totally broke Gentoo (this was when the PAM breakage progressively ate my installation, so many of you know how long ago that was, the time of the Great PAM Uprising). The drive has not been in use since I reinstalled SuSE (having eventually learned to use it) and installed Gentoo on hda (which is when the 9GB drive had moved to hdd from hda), and so the drive remained connected as hdd but not in use (mounted, etc). Eventually, in order to remove the drive and send it back to our "emergency drive pool", I reformatted it with QTParted to FAT32 (but the drive remained connected since I couldn't find the time to shut down in order to physically remove it). Although the reformat seemed to go correctly, I noticed that after having done so, I started seeing messages at boot saying that the drive was listed with thus and so number of heads and cylinders, the drive was reporting thus and so different number of heads and cylinders, and that the drive's reported numbers would be used. It concerned me (since I couldn't imagine what was reporting the drive geometry in the first place, even though I understood that whatever it was was reporting the original drive geometry but had not been updated with the reformat), but the drive was still not in use, so I let it go. Finally today I removed the 9GB drive and replaced it with the original drive that it had replaced as an emergency measure. The 'real' drive that I re-connected is a 40GB FAT32 drive with 2 partitions, again connected to hdd. Because this is the real drive, with files that I now want to use, the fact that every time I try to mount it, I get the message that /dev/hdd is busy or the mount point is already in use (no matter what mount point I use, even a newly-created one) has finally brought the problem home to roost. I get it that this drive -- or rather hdd-- is being listed somewhere in both drive geometry and mount points, and this erroneous entry or entries is what's preventing me from mounting the partitions, but I can't figure out where this is happening. /etc/fstab and /etc/mtab don't refer to it and mount shows it not to be mounted. The only thing I can think of is that this is some kind of weird evms conflict, and the drive certainly is listed in evmsgui, but really my useage of evms is so very limited that I almost should go back to lvm2, so I really am not getting how this interaction is occurring, and how to stop it, if in fact it is evms that is causing it (which it probably is). Can anybody mark me a path out of this swamp? I'd like access to the files stored on this drive again. Thanks, Holly -- [email protected] mailing list
