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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!think.com!enterpoop.mit.edu!ai-lab!hal.gnu.ai.mit.edu!Calvin From: Calvin@hal.gnu.ai.mit.edu (Eric John Vette) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions Subject: 386BSD Refuses to mount drives; mount failure Date: 4 May 1993 18:41:34 GMT Organization: Calvin Chapter of Cha-Ching International Lines: 64 Sender: calvin@hal.gnu.ai.mit.edu (Eric John Vette) Distribution: world Message-ID: <1s6dcuINN3o7@life.ai.mit.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: hal.ai.mit.edu Keywords: mount drive help confusion mattresses-on-the-walls white-rooms HELP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! After weeks of pulling my hair out over this problem, I've finally grown desperate enough to post a plea to the net. I have had BSD running exclusively on my machine since last May (wow - it's really been a whole year without DOS :), and have become very familiar and very comfortable with it. I've installed X, TeX, and a lot of toys, including the patchkit up to 0.2.1. (I think I got that far; I meant to do it, but I don't remember if my machine died just before or after.) At any rate, I had de-installed the original Lambert patch-kit and had installed at least one of the new (Nate Williams?) patch-kits. I made a new kernel, booted without any problem (didn't notice any major difference, though, but at least I was up to date.) Iwas running fine for a while until... Here's the problem: I was making boot floppies for another machine I was trying to UNIXise, when, after mounting and unmounting several times, it suddenly refused to mount a floppy. The error code was similar to "mount: mount /dev/fd0a on /mnta: Operation not permitted." I didn't think to much of it, thought maybe the kernel got a little confused, so I flushed and rebooted. The kernel came up, fscked, and then (after an invisible swapon) came up with the same error as it tried to "mount -a" from the rc. A host of other errors appropriately followed, claiming the the device was read only (root_device before it's remounted as wd0a). I've been goofing with this, threatening it with fates worse than being outdated, whispered sweet nothings inot its PC speaker, etc. I even re-disklabeled from the Fixit Disk, thinking maybe there was a freaky, invisible Write-only bit in the disklabel (yes, I disklabelled -r first to check the visible Write-only bit). Diagnostics: After such a psychologically and ego-bruising experience, the only thing I could think of in my limitted mental capacity was to boot the fixit disk, and try mounting from there. It mounts from floppy. I can mount other FS into their normal positions with respect to wd0a (moved down the tree, putting wd0a on /mnt, wd1a on /mnt/usr/home, and as0a on /mnt/usr/toys). However, if I boot the floppy, mount /dev/wd0a on /mnt and cd to /mnt, then chroot /mnt, I can no longer mount any of the other filing systems. The REAL Question: What would make mount fail? More specifically, what would make mount fail in those conditions? I've already browsed through the source for the mount command, as well as the mount system call, and the solution still escapes me. Sorry bout the long-windedness. I thought it was (mostly) necessary for me to explain where I am. Thanks in advance for any thoughts on the subject. calvin@axe.cit.wayne.edu calvin@gnu.ai.mit.edu -- ***************************************************************************** * The views expressed here are not * Eric Vette (Calvin) * * those of the FSF, my employer(s), * Computational Biochemist * * myself, or anyone else! * calvin@gnu.ai.mit.edu * * * calvin@axe.cit.wayne.edu * ***********************************************************.sig*virus********