Mount command finishes successully, but disk is not mounted

Question

We're trying to mount a disk, but even though the mount command finishes successfully, the disk isn't mounted

bart@test:/$ sudo mount -v /data
mount: /dev/sdc1 mounted on /data.
bart@test:/$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev            3.4G     0  3.4G   0% /dev
tmpfs           697M  688K  697M   1% /run
/dev/sda1        29G  3.0G   26G  11% /
tmpfs           3.5G     0  3.5G   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
tmpfs           3.5G     0  3.5G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sda15      105M  3.4M  102M   4% /boot/efi
/dev/sdb1        14G   41M   13G   1% /mnt
tmpfs           697M     0  697M   0% /run/user/1000

Here is the relevant line in /etc/fstab:

UUID=f7c675d9-6b7c-4f96-a26f-5991df9b7cac    /data   ext4   defaults 1   2

Any idea what we could be missing?

/data is an empty folder with root permissions.

Output of blkid:

/dev/sdb1: UUID="7e15008f-4654-4f1d-8aec-1f233c68e5ea" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="3dbf34a8-01"
/dev/sda1: LABEL="cloudimg-rootfs" UUID="21b294f1-25bd-4265-9c4e-d6e4aeb57e97" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="bcf3ccb8-bce6-4498-93fb-1b9bd59fc81c"
/dev/sda15: LABEL="UEFI" UUID="5CC4-10AB" TYPE="vfat" PARTUUID="ee783a1a-c5d0-42d9-b874-71796971f49b"
/dev/sda14: PARTUUID="2081abbc-a4ba-496a-b391-07952095f65d"
/dev/sdc1: UUID="f7c675d9-6b7c-4f96-a26f-5991df9b7cac" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="54aa8864-01"

[Solved]: So while we tried this very thing multiple times yesterday, we just executed a reboot, and now the device is there. It probably got fixed by changes we made by pointers in this post. I don't know why it required a reboot, but all is good now.

you could try checking journalctl -b. if systemd thinks the device does not exist / is removed, it has a mis-feature where it will unmount the disk. i guess you could also check systemctl list-units *.device and see if there is a systemd device unit for /dev/sdc1. — sourcejedi, Oct 11 '18 at 07:43
also please make a habit to specify the OS distribution and version. This would have indicated whether you are using systemd or not :-). — sourcejedi, Oct 11 '18 at 07:45
also did you try running sudo df ? See https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/445225/why-df-h-not-showing-partition-mounted/453694#453694 — sourcejedi, Oct 11 '18 at 07:57
https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/597525 or directly see https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/1741 — T Nierath, Jul 09 '20 at 07:25

score 27 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 11 '18 at 07:49

27

The most likely reason is that file system is mounted, as the mount commands reports, but then systemd thinks it knows better and unmounts it before you can see it.

You could use another directory as a mount point, or find out from the logs why it is unmounted.

answered Oct 11 '18 at 07:49

RalfFriedl

8,981

14

So true, It got fixed by systemctl daemon-reexec. How dare systemd make such assumptions and decide to do something? That's why enterprise grade distributions should stop supporting it as the only available init daemon. – Alireza Mohamadi Jan 05 '21 at 22:28
1

Oh god, thank you, this was my case too. systemd is too smart... – Ilia Andrienko Apr 07 '21 at 11:59
This helped in my case too, on Raspberry PI OS. – DiDiev Dec 13 '21 at 09:54
This would be a lot more interesting if you had any explanation of what the problem actually was. – EML Jan 24 '24 at 13:26
@EML True. But the ways of systemd are mysterious and beyond mere mortals. – RalfFriedl Jan 24 '24 at 16:39

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 07 '22 at 22:12

In my case, after the volume successfully mounted, systemd was immediately unmounting it for me (thanks to RalfFriedl for his answer which gave me the hint I needed). This was verifying by running journalctl -f and mounting the volume, and observing the log.

The fix was to add the volume to the /etc/fstab file and then reboot. systemd will adjust itself at boot time based on the fstab file, so it will no longer unmount your volume. Note that you can configure mounts directly in systemd, but the /etc/fstab is the correct place for humans to do it:

Mount units may either be configured via unit files, or via /etc/fstab (see fstab(5) for details). Mounts listed in /etc/fstab will be converted into native units dynamically at boot and when the configuration of the system manager is reloaded. In general, configuring mount points through /etc/fstab is the preferred approach to manage mounts for humans. For tooling, writing mount units should be preferred over editing /etc/fstab. See systemd-fstab-generator(8) for details about the conversion from /etc/fstab to mount units.

My /etc/fstab entry. Your UUID will surely be different:

UUID=5ffa5f54-6ff0-47dd-97f8-b3446d58b239    /mnt    ext4 
   defaults,noatime,nofail    0    2

Mount command finishes successully, but disk is not mounted

2 Answers2