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rausch
Asked: 2011-04-23 00:50:07 +0800 CST

"Special device does not exist"

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I have 3 hard drives in my machine. Two of them are 1TB drives with my old home partition on a software RAID1. I installed an SSD as a 3rd drive with a fresh Ubuntu 10.10 currently running. I now try to mount my old home partition, which gives me an error:

$ mount -t reiserfs /dev/sda5 /mnt/oldhome
mount: special device /dev/sda5 does not exist

fdisk shows me that all partitions are there. /dev has sda and sdb in it, but not the partitions on them.

Any ideas?

edit:

blkid shows me the following:

/dev/sda: TYPE="isw_raid_member" 
/dev/sdb: TYPE="isw_raid_member" 
/dev/mapper/isw_eahifbiigj_datadump1: UUID="247dbff9-236f-4fa7-a0d4-1f060d973a3e" TYPE="reiserfs" 
/dev/sdc1: UUID="6ba699d7-caaa-4a87-9deb-e7aca73984de" TYPE="ext4"

I can mount the third one, which contains some orphaned partition, living on sda1.

mount

2 Answers

  1. DM-RAID (the variant of RAID in use here, sometimes also known as SATA RAID, BIOS RAID, or fake RAID) creates a separate device for the whole array and suppresses the partitions for the component devices. In other words, /dev/sda5 is only the redundant half of your old home partition on your first disk, rather than the whole thing.

    On Ubuntu 10.10, I believe that partition 5 of your array should be on /dev/mapper/isw_eahifbiigj_datadump15. From Ubuntu 11.04, this will move to /dev/mapper/isw_eahifbiigj_datadump1p5.

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  2. Fixed similar problem by changing the mount line in /etc/fstab from /dev/mapper/isw_Volume01 to /dev/mapper/isw_Volume0p1

    NOTE! The extra small "p" in there. I.e Volume01 -> Volume0p1

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