/mnt not mounted already, or bad option

linux filesystems command-line-interface mount sles

24,699

It's simpler than you think. You can find docs of mount in man page of mount command.

man mount

There is a way to do search inside man page but this is another subject.

Mount's man pages specifies that remount option is used to attempt to remount an already-mounted filesystem. So you should only use that option if the filesystem is already mounted.

Also, in most cases, you don't need to specify filesystem type. It should be automatically detected unless the partition table is damaged.

That should work:

mount -o rw /dev/sda1 /mnt

Also please note that you can create folders in /mnt when nothing yet is mounted in order to have mount points for multiple devices/partitions.

Just mkdir /mnt/sda1 and mount sda1 in there, not in the /mnt root.

24,699

orbitwar

Learning Java, and has experience with (very) basic web development.

Updated on September 18, 2022

Comments

orbitwar over 1 year

When mounting the drive /dev/sda1 (mount -o remount,rw /dev/sda1 -t ext4 /mnt)from a rescue cd, I get mount: /mnt not mounted already, or bad option. I don't know what to do here because I've searched forums for hours and no-one had a fix that worked. I need this solution because i'm using it to chroot into an old machine with some files on it and a password I need to recover.
- Admin almost 7 years
  
  Please type mount and paste its output.
- Admin almost 7 years
  
  Is sda1 mounted already? To check it use command: mount | grep sda1.
- Admin almost 7 years
  
  The error message tells you all you need to know: /mnt is not already mounted, so the "remount" part of your mount command is wrong, there's nothing to REmount.
- Admin almost 7 years
  
  @Marco <code>tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (Rw,mode=1777) Proc on /proc type proc (rw) Sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw) Debugfs on /sys/kernel/debug type debugfs (rw) Udev on /dev type tmpfs (rw,mode=0755) devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,mode=0620,gid=5</code> each 4-space gap represents a line break. I was writing this on a phone so the enter button was send, sorry.
- Admin almost 7 years
  
  @MikhailKhirgiy There was no response, no error code or confirmation.
- Admin almost 7 years
  
  @orbitwar Then MatarangeCa is right!
- Admin almost 7 years
  
  @wurtel Ok, I tried the command without ‘remount,’ and ‘-t ext4’ and even specifying ‘-o rw’ didn’t work and it returned mount: warning: /mount seems to be mounted read-only. :( the whole command was mount -o rw /dev/sda1 /mnt
- Admin almost 7 years
  
  Well, according to your pasted output, I actually agree with the response below, -o remount shouldn't be there. Have you tried the same command without this option? It should give you no output and successfully mount sda1. Then try mount |grep sda1 again. It should show the mounted partition.
- Admin almost 7 years
  
  @Marco I did the command he (and @wurtel )said, mount -o rw /dev/sda1 /mnt and it returned mount: warning: /mnt seems to be mounted read-only I honestly thought his answer would work.
- Admin almost 7 years
  
  Then you pasted wrong (!!!) or at least partial mount output. umount /mnt. If you get an error, umount -f /mnt. Then follow answer's suggestions.
- Admin almost 7 years
  
  @Marco Ok, while you were responding, I was checking the command 3 times then unmounting and mounting again to no avail. I ran the umount twice to confirm, now it’s unmounted. Now I run the command he sent and same thing. Read only. I’ll even retype it instead of using up arrow and read only again, sigh
- Admin almost 7 years
  
  Mount it elsewhere. mkdir /ciao . mount /dev/sda1 /ciao. You must be root to do this.
- Admin almost 7 years
  
  @Marco hmm, mount: warning: ciao seems to be mounted read-only I will be back in about an hour, sorry for the inconvenience
- Admin almost 7 years
  
  It lets you create a folder, but you can't mount anything rw into it. Try mount -o ro /dev/sda1 /ciao .
- Admin almost 7 years
  
  And change the live distro you're using for this, it's c**p, switch to debian live, ubuntu or knoppix.
- Admin almost 7 years
  
  @Marco I ran the command with -o ro instead and there was no error but when I tried to do mkdir it was read only, so that didn’t work. I switched live OS from suse (matching the os on the system) to Ubuntu and tried the command. There was no error or anything and it mounted but when I test rw capabilities by doing cd /mnt && Sudo mkdir test , it says mkdir: cannot create directory @testA: read-only filesystem
- Admin over 6 years
  
  I think filesystem on sda1 is corrupted or not successfully unmounted (by power off). Unmount it and test it by command e2fsck -vf /dev/sda1.
- Admin over 6 years
  
  Also show to us the output of command cat /proc/mdstat.
- Admin over 6 years
  
  This sounds disappointing as I’ve had superblock problems before. I ran the e2fsck command and there were multiple lines of outputs. I will just put a simplified version of each. Bad magic number in super block, super block invalid, and the super block can not be read or doesn’t have a correct ext2 file system. So that much be the root of the problem. Now I assume the drive is unusable but this make me curious because the os still boots up. Anyway, the other command you gave me doesn’t work. I switched to knoppix because Ubuntu live wasn’t working so that might be the issue.
- Admin over 6 years
  
  THe comment was too long, and the result of that command was : cat: /proc/ is a directory and cat: mdstat: no such file or directory.
- Admin over 6 years
  
  Also, in Gparted the file system is unknown. This is probably why it’s read-only. Even the system mounted it automatically and I couldn’t write to it. I think we’ve solved it but I’m not completely sure, so I’m open to responses :)
- Admin over 6 years
  
  If it’s not possible to write, should I clone the drive (only 1GB) to an sd card, then do a Chroot? I would have to get the mbr and everything, though. Something I’ve never done successfully
- Admin over 6 years
  
  I recommend you to use SystemResqueCD and testdisk program to try to rescue filesystem. Do full backup or disk duplication before all.
- Admin over 6 years
  
  Ok, I got the disc and booted to it then did test disk but dumb me forgot to backup before doing so... it did the partition repair and it turned two partitions into one and now it has rw capabilities (yay?). I couldn’t chroot into it though, no bin/bash and there was no home folder
- Admin over 6 years
  
  Now I think it’s a lost cause because the hard drive is screwed up, and I don’t know if it can still boot. I’ll check tomorrow afternoon for that though
- Admin over 6 years
  
  The os doesn't work anymore, it just goes to a grub prompt. I'll just install a new os... Oh well. It was a good try though and great effort, thanks for the help everybody! Sorry to let you down with this new though