F12 Boot error message re mount of loop device

[Michael Schwendt]

On Wed, 9 Dec 2009 22:00:37 +0000, Marko wrote:

> On Wednesday 09 December 2009 18:59:19 Bill Davidsen wrote:
> > David wrote:
> > > During boot I want to mount an iso9660 file as a loop device. The iso
> > > file is on a ext3 partition labelled HUGE_01 which is mounted at
> > > /mnt/huge.
> > >
> > > FILE = /mnt/huge/get/iso/Fedora-12-i386-DVD/Fedora-12-i386-DVD.iso
> > > MOUNTPOINT = /mnt/Fedora-12-i386-DVD.
> > >
> > > The mount succeeds. However during boot I get this unnecessary failure
> > > message:
> > >
> > > Mounting local filesystems: [ OK ]
> > > [snip]
> > > Mounting other filesystems:  mount: according to mtab
> > > /mnt/huge/get/iso/Fedora-12-i386-DVD/Fedora-12-i386-DVD.iso is already
> > > mounted on /mnt/Fedora-12-i386-DVD as loop  [ FAILED ]
> 
> The proper question is why do you mount it twice?

Not really.

> If it should be 
> automatically mounted at boot, the fstab entry should be enough. However, it 
> seems that you or the system is trying to mount it again later during boot. 
> You need to locate where in the boot process is this happening. What messages 
> are between the two tries? IOW, what is in the [snip] part?

Enough output is available in the quotes.
"Mounting local filesystems" is in rc.sysinit.
"Mounting other filesystems" is in netfs service script.
The former does:

	action $"Mounting local filesystems: " mount -a -t nonfs,nfs4,smbfs,ncpfs,cifs,gfs,gfs2 -O no_netdev

The latter does:

	action $"Mounting other filesystems: " mount -a -t nonfs,nfs4,cifs,ncpfs,gfs

So, both mount iso9660 file-systems, and unlike other types of mounts,
iso9660 prints that ugly warning. You can run those mount -a ... lines
manually for testing. The work-around I've used is to mount them with
option _netdev added in fstab. That mounts iso9660 within the netfs service
script, which is not exactly right here, but good enough and an alternative
to doing it manually in rc.local