I got the error "resource is busy" while trying to mount my hard drive

Question

While trying to mount my hard drive to copy all the necessary data from my broken drive to this one, I got an error saying:

# mount -t ntfs /dev/sda1 /mnt/dominik/
fuse: mount failed: Device or resource busy

This is my fdisk -l if that helps.

# fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 640.1 GB, 640135028736 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 77825 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x70000000
   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1       77826   625130496    7  HPFS/NTFS

And just to let you know I can see this partition in Computer but when I try to access it I get this error

Solution 1

I suspect that /dev/sda1 is already mounted under /media/ACER. Nautilus automatically mounts partitions when selecting it on the left side. You cannot mount a partition multiple times (leaving out --bind mounts).

Solution 2

Solve for me :

sudo apt-get purge multipath-tools

say yes

then

sudo reboot

;)

Comments

[Patryk]

Acer is /dev/sdb1 - it's a different hard drive.

[Hanynowsky]

So what is the solution to this issue?? You did not tell!

[Lekensteyn]

@Mediterran81 The solution is using the old mount point OR unmounting the old one. If you open a terminal you can get a list of mounted filesystems by running mount without arguments.

[Hanynowsky]

Ok, thanks, that is logical. It just happened I did not understand why the system was unable to overwrite infos about the same mounting point. Actually, I uncommented the line corresponding to the External Drive that matters, in fstab file (using dynamic mounting instead of static one) and everything is back to normal! Thanks for the confirmation :)