Porteus

Posted: **26 Mar 2020, 04:37**

System Porteus 5.0rc1 XFCE version.

For some reason there went something wrong mounting the external HD ext3 partition.

It is not listed in the mounted drives by my function dx. Why do I use this function instead of "df -Tm"? For two reasons:
● it displays also a date+time stamp; that is very useful when you need to free disk space and want to compare instances of dx ran in the present and older ran ones; or when you start to run out of disk space - you can easily compare older ran dx with the most recent ran instance of dx.
● it omits some entries that usually I do not want to see: e.g. all mounted squashfs modules, since you have no df ("disk free") in these anyway, you cannot store any data in these since modules are read-only anyway. So listing a bunch of these via df never made any sense to me.

This is the code of the function:

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dx () 
{ 
    echo $(date +%d.%m.%Y\ %H:%M:%S) ____________________________________________________________;
    /bin/df -Tm $* | grep -vE 'tmpfs|/mnt/live/run|squashfs'
}

Cave! Be aware that my function is kinda stupid, with the displayed divider made out of "___" characters, it just assumes the terminal or VT has a width of 80 characters, but it not checks this.

Now, back to my ext3 issue.

Aside from it not being listed with either dx of df, when I address it directly e.g. "dx /mnt/sdb4" it gets listed like so (same is true with the original df, aka listed via "df -Tm"):

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-              -          469603  81481    383350  18% /mnt/sdb4

when the correct entry should look like so:

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/dev/sdb4      ext3       469603  81481    383350  18% /mnt/sdb4

When trying to list it via "dx /dev/sdb4" dx lists nothing since it omits devtmpfs and df -mT lists this:

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root@porteus:/# df -mT /dev/sdb4
Filesystem     Type     1M-blocks  Used Available Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs       devtmpfs      1936     0      1936   0% /dev

Trying to mount it via the XFCE desktop icon results in this error window:

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Error mounting system-managed device /dev/sdb4: Command-line `mount "/mnt/sdb4"' exited with non-zero exit status 32: mount: /mnt/sdb4: /dev/sdb4 already mounted or mount point busy.

Any idea what went wrong while mounting the ext3 filesystem?

Is this a possible danger for the data on that FS?
Or is the ext3 FS handled okay and the journal is working just fine?

While researching this issue I found this entry in the online version of "man mount"

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FILES

   /etc/mnttab

   Table of mounted file systems.

Since I never heard of /etc/mnttab, only of /etc/mtab, I looked what our Slackware based Porteus is using:

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guest@porteus:/$ ls -oa /etc/mtab
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root 17 Jan  9 13:29 /etc/mtab -> /proc/self/mounts
guest@porteus:/$ ls -oa /etc/mnttab
/bin/ls: cannot access '/etc/mnttab': No such file or directory

No wonder I never encountered or even heard from /etc/mnttab.

Do some Linux variants now use /etc/mnttab while others still use the older well known /etc/mtab?
"mtab" it not to be found even a single time in the online mount manual.

Posted: **26 Mar 2020, 05:35**

Rava wrote: ↑
26 Mar 2020, 04:37
Do some Linux variants now use /etc/mnttab while others still use the older well known /etc/mtab?
"mtab" it not to be found even a single time in the online mount manual.

i'd be inclined to think that the man.cx page is out of date, when compared to say https://jlk.fjfi.cvut.cz/arch/manpages/man/mount.8 or https://linux.die.net/man/8/mount
a general search for mnttab gives old solaris or redhat issues...
not that that this any help with your issue..
just to clarify: does manually using mount, (as root) correctly mount it?

Posted: **26 Mar 2020, 06:36**

ncmprhnsbl wrote: ↑
26 Mar 2020, 05:35
i'd be inclined to think that the man.cx page is out of date, when compared to say https://jlk.fjfi.cvut.cz/arch/manpages/man/mount.8 or https://linux.die.net/man/8/mount

Then maybe the Porteus script for accessing the man pages should be updated, e.g. to https://jlk.fjfi.cvut.cz/arch/manpages/ or to https://linux.die.net/ ?
_____________________________________

ncmprhnsbl wrote: ↑
26 Mar 2020, 05:35
just to clarify: does manually using mount, (as root) correctly mount it?

Nope:

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root@porteus:/# umount /mnt/sdb4
root@porteus:/# echo $?
0
root@porteus:/# mount /mnt/sdb4
root@porteus:/# echo $?
0
root@porteus:/# dx /mnt/sdb4
26.03.2020 08:19:52 ____________________________________________________________
Filesystem     Type 1M-blocks  Used Available Use% Mounted on
-              -       469603 81481    383350  18% /mnt/sdb4

Also, this:

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root@porteus:/# umount /mnt/sdb4
root@porteus:/# fsck.ext3 /dev/sdb4
e2fsck 1.45.5 (07-Jan-2020)
extHDx_4: clean, 631/30547968 files, 22809168/122168300 blocks

Porteus

Port 5.0rc1 XFCE - external ext3 weirdly mounted

Port 5.0rc1 XFCE - external ext3 weirdly mounted

Port 5.0rc1 XFCE - external ext3 weirdly mounted

Port 5.0rc1 XFCE - external ext3 weirdly mounted