cannot mount debian harddisk from knoppix live cd

[malaire]

Hi malaire,

Thanks for the continued response.
Here's basically what happens with umount:

#mkdir /mymnt
#mount -t ext3 -o rw /dev/hda1 /mymnt
mount: /dev/hda1 already mounted or /mymnt busy

#umount /dev/hda1
umount: /dev/hda1: not mounted

What might "/mymnt busy" mean? Regardless of what directory I create (or don't create if I just use /mnt) I get this message.

IMHO, it means that there is some program which is using that directory, or some file(s) within that directory.
You should never get that error for new directory, because no program is using it yet, so I don't understand this at all.

Could you try mount -v -t ext3 -o rw /dev/hda1 /mymnt if it gives any additional information of what's wrong.

Any idea what might be wrong? It seems like whenever I create a directory that directory becomes "busy." What would cause that?

Thanks for your suggestions.

As a last resort, you could try some other LiveCDs instead of Knoppix, just in case there's some problems with Knoppix.
There is a big list at http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php
I've used at least SLAX from http://www.slax.org/.

If that doesn't work either, then could it be possible that your partition is somehow damaged, and that would cause these problems?
You could try if dumpe2fs /dev/hda1 gives any errors.
There's also debugfs but that seems to be far too technical for normal users to use.