Umounting a file system in Init 1

[Rick Stevens]

On Sat, 2006-12-02 at 19:43 -0800, Mobolaji.Osinuga at alcatel-lucent.fr
wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I brought down my test system to single user mode using init 1. I have 2 
> partitions on this system, /(/dev/sda1) and /var (/dev/sda6).
> I'm trying to umount the /var file system but it's reporting device busy. 
> Umounting forcefully doesn't help either.
> 
> Can someone give me a killer command to umount this partition, while still 
> maintaining the serenity of my system? Or is this a forbidden process so 
> that I can start with rescue disk instead?

The odds are that the system logger is still running and holding
/var/log/messages open.  First, try running (as the root user):

	service syslog stop

Then try unmounting /var.  If you still can't unmount it, you can find
out what progtrams have files open on it by doing by running this
command as the root user:

	lsof | grep /var

Find the process(es) that are still holding something on /var open and
shut them down.  You can shut them down rudely by doing (as root):

	kill -9 procid

Replace "procid" with the process ID you got from the 'lsof' command for
the process in question.

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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-         C program run. C program crash. C programmer quit.         -
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