[SOLVED] "One or more block devices are holding..."

[Fuzzy]

I had installed Katya x64 on a system and was very blissful - loved it. I tinkered and broke grub2, then was too stupid to fix it (the first time), and I reloaded a fresh install.

Here's the problem. The first install allowed me to access all of the hard drives in my system with no problems (all of which were NTFS partitions). I was able to listen to music from the drives, view pictures, etc - full access, no problems.

However, on the new install, the volume which I have all my music stored on (NTFS) shows up as "Unable to mount location" "One or more block devices are holding" (this is when I go through the GUI, COMPUTER icon and try browsing to the volume).

There is no RAID or anything similar in the equation, and no hardware changed made between the first install of Katya, and the second. Windows can still happily access the volume when I boot into Windows.

If I try to do a mount from the command line, I receive a "device is busy" message.

fdisk -l shows everything is normal and healthy.

I have been unable to find any help via the search engines...as most pertain to RAID and such.

EDIT: Forgot one detail. Three other NTFS partitions (on the same drive) all still work perfectly for both Katya and Windows. It is only this fourth partition that Katya can't mount.

Thanks.

[Fuzzy]

Just bumping my post. The exact error dialog is:

Unable to mount location
One or more block devices are holding /dev/sdd5

Again - no RAID is used, and other partitions on the drive mount just fine. The partition was able to mount under previous installations of Katya, and still is accessible from WindowsXP, Vista, 7, etc. The hard drive is plugged directly to the SATA on the motherboard.

Any help or ideas of what to check would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

[Fuzzy]

More Notes:

If I run fdisk on /dev/sdd - everything looks healthy, but if I go into advanced/expert fdisk and tell it to display extended partitions...I receive the following output:

Nr AF Hd Sec Cyl Hd Sec Cyl Start Size ID
2 00 254 63 1023 254 63 1023 204796620 471041865 05
5 00 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 00


Is this how an extended partition would normally look?

Thanks!

[Fuzzy]

Okay - while this doesn't really tell me what it was, or why it showed up...I DID find a way to fix it.

Before you try this, remember that it was only my current install of Katya that couldn't access the partition - all other LiveCD/installed OSs, etc could access the partition in question without problem. Also, I was working on a single extended partition with one logical partition in it. This should work for multiple partitions, but you'd have to write down a lot more info before starting. Most importantly - BACKUP ALL YOUR DATA!!!!

Here's what I ended up doing:

Backed up my data using Windows, then booted back into Mint.

Opened terminal.

sudo fdisk -l -u /dev/sdd (/dev/sdd was the drive where the problem partition was)

Among other things, it showed me that /dev/sdd2 was my extended partion, and that it began at 204796620 and ended at 675838484.
It also showed me that the logical partition was at /dev/sdd5 and started at 204796683 and ended at 675838484.

So, I wrote the starting and stopping sectors down for the extended partition and logical partition.

I then did sudo fdisk -u /dev/sdd (not sure if the -u does anything, afterall, I'm new)
Once in fdisk, I pressed c to disable ms-dos compatible (I was prompted to do so automatically), you need the units to display as sectors, so only press u if you need to change the displayed units.
I listed the partitions by pressing p (just to make sure I was on the right disk, and that everything matched my earlier listing)
Then, I pressed d and chose partition 5 to delete. (to delete my old /dev/sdd5 logical partition)
Then, I pressed d and chose partition 2 to delete. (to delete my old /dev/sdd2 extended partition)
I then wrote the changes by pressing w (Make sure to read whether or not the system needs a reboot at this point - if so, do it).
After reboot, I came back and sudo fdisk -u -l /dev/sdd again - just to make sure the partition wasn't listed.
I then sudo fdisk -u /dev/sdd
I pressed c again when prompted.
I again pressed p to list the partitions, and found the space listed as unallocated...perfect!

Then, (this is the important part), I selected n to create a new partition, but instead of accepting the default sector starting point, I entered the old LOGICAL partition starting point (in the above example this was 204796683 - the beginning sector of my old /dev/sdd5 partition which contained the data) for the beginning sector, and 67583884 for the ending sector (which was the ending sector from my original /dev/sdd5).
I then changed the partition id type to 07 (NTFS) to match the original /dev/sdd5 partition.
I pressed w to write the changes.
I rebooted the system and some of my files were back and working! (But not all of them)
I rebooted into Windows and it wanted to run scandisk - which I allowed. At completion, all my files were there, and the partition was even named with the original partition name (I didn't retype this or anything).
I booted into Katya again and lo and behold - everything works like a dream again!! I can mount my music partition!!! Life is good!

Marking as solved, but I'll try to remember to check back every once in a while in case I can offer any clarifications.

Thanks for all of those who read through my original posts - I appreciate the effort!