O.K. I've done a bad, baaaad, thing and I really need help. I am running a dual boot with windows 98 and RedHat 7.3, which was an upgrade from 7.2 rather than a straight workstation install. The old 7.2 was stable for a long time, and I've done bad things that I know caused this problem, so I don't think it is due to the upgrade step. I am the only user. The problem in short is that one of my windows vfat partitions won't unmount, not even if I try unmount after su-ing to root. It complains that the device is busy. There really should be nothing else using that device (I mean, I'm not running any services that ought to be looking there). I can unmount the drive if I log out and log back in again (even without doing any kind of restart or shut down). But if I then remount the device, I can't unmount it without repeating the logout/in. I believe there is old information of a mount request stuck somewhere in the system and it won't let it go. Some hopefully helpful output from the system is at the end of this message below the -----. Further details of how I directly messed everything up follow immediately below. I tried to set up autofs to automount my windows partitions. Being a newbie, I specified the same mount points in my /etc/auto.misc file as I did in /etc/fstab. Then I typed a mount command for the drive (why! could have just let it automount - don't ask) and it mounted, of course. It was probably also mounted by autofs on the same mount point and things got gummed up. Well, I figured out that this wasn't a good idea and changed the mount point for the automounter from /mnt/winc to /automount/winc for drive hda5 (and likewise for my other windows vfat partitions). In my mind the details are now fuzzy, but I tried to restart the automounter (can't remember if I tried stopping it and started it, or whether I just restarted it). Whatever I did, the winc drive was mounted and I couldn't unmount it. Regrettably, I then did all sorts of stupid stuff. It seemed I had two copies of the autofs daemon running, so I tried killing the old one. It wouldn't shut off by typing '/etc/init.d/autofs stop' no matter how many times I typed it (i.e. to kill the current one and then the old one) so I had to use kill. I don't remember if I used -HUP or -9 to kill it, although I would have tried -HUP first. Well the drive still wouldn't unmount, and /etc/mtab was listing two copies of automount and two mounts of winc at the same mount point. So I made the fatal error of assuming root and removing the two offending lines from /etc/mtab (meaning the older ones). It seems like that when I mounted it twice at the same time on the same mount point, that some leftover junk from the automount is lying around in the system somewhere. A cold restart is no better than logging out and logging back in in terms of dealing with the problem. Any ideas of where to look to fix this, or useful tools, or any kind of documentation? The man pages for mount/unmount and documentation for autofs don't really go into this much depth. Although any bonehead should know better than to do what I've done, I'm having trouble finding a way out. Thanks for any suggestions, Rob Helpful, I hope: --------------------------- $cat /etc/fstab LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1 LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2 none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0 LABEL=/home /home ext3 defaults 1 2 none /proc proc defaults 0 0 none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0 /dev/hda8 swap swap defaults 0 0 /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,user,exec,kudzu,ro 0 0 /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,user,kudzu 0 0 /dev/hda1 /mnt/winc vfat owner,user,noauto 0 0 /dev/hda5 /mnt/wind vfat owner,user,noauto 0 0 /dev/hda6 /mnt/winaux vfat owner,user,noauto 0 0 /dev/hdb4 /mnt/zip100.0 auto noauto,owner,user,kudzu 0 0 /dev/sda1 /mnt/camera vfat noauto,owner,user, 0 0 /dev/hda1 /automount/winc vfat noauto,owner,user 0 0 /dev/hda5 /automount/wind vfat noauto,owner,user 0 0 /dev/hda6 /automount/winaux vfat noauto,owner,user 0 0 The following is with nothing mounted - successfully unmounted the winc drive from /mnt. $ cat /etc/mtab /dev/hda3 / ext3 rw 0 0 none /proc proc rw 0 0 usbdevfs /proc/bus/usb usbdevfs rw 0 0 /dev/hda7 /boot ext3 rw 0 0 none /dev/pts devpts rw,gid=5,mode=620 0 0 /dev/hda4 /home ext3 rw 0 0 none /dev/shm tmpfs rw 0 0 $ cat /etc/auto.master # $Id: auto.master,v 1.2 1997/10/06 21:52:03 hpa Exp $ # Sample auto.master file # Format of this file: # mountpoint map options # For details of the format look at autofs(8). # /misc /etc/auto.misc --timeout=60 /automount /etc/auto.misc --timeout=60 $cat /etc/auto.misc # $Id: auto.misc,v 1.2 1997/10/06 21:52:04 hpa Exp $ # This is an automounter map and it has the following format # key [ -mount-options-separated-by-comma ] location # Details may be found in the autofs(5) manpage winc -fstype=vfat,rw,nosuid,noexec,noauto,user :/dev/hda1 wind -fstype=vfat,rw,nosuid,noexec,noauto,user :/dev/hda5 winaux -fstype=vfat,rw,nosuid,noexec,noauto,user :/dev/hda6 ---hoping maybe that one of these locks is the culprit, although I'm not sure that could possibly be clear from the following: $cat /proc/locks 1: POSIX ADVISORY READ 1877 03:03:133268 4 4 c7c023a0 c02c5508 c7c02234 00000000 c7c023ac 2: POSIX ADVISORY WRITE 1228 03:04:376882 0 EOF c7c02230 c7c023a4 c7c0217c 00000000 c7c0223c 3: POSIX ADVISORY WRITE 1228 03:04:376845 0 EOF c7c02178 c7c02234 c7c021d8 00000000 c7c02184 4: POSIX ADVISORY WRITE 1020 03:03:133259 0 EOF c7c021d4 c7c0217c c7c02120 00000000 c7c021e0 5: FLOCK ADVISORY WRITE 931 03:03:133254 0 EOF c7c0211c c7c021d8 c02c5508 00000000 c7c02128