Mounting drives that have '\040' in the name in fstab throws up an error during boot.

[Chris Thompson]

In 12.10 my drives that are mounted in /media/Storage\0401 and /media/Storage\0402 produce an error message during boot. However when prompted to skip mounting they do mount correctly upon login. This happens in Kubuntu, which displays an error message, and in Gnome remix, which does not. However, Gnome successfully boots after pressing 'S', to skip mounting, twice.

Drives that are mounted in /media/Storage, /media/Storage1 and /media/Storage2 work without problems.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.10
Package: plymouth 0.8.4-0ubuntu3
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.5.0-16.25-generic 3.5.4
Uname: Linux 3.5.0-16-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.6.1-0ubuntu1
Architecture: amd64
Date: Mon Oct 1 17:19:08 2012
DefaultPlymouth: /lib/plymouth/themes/ubuntu-gnome-logo/ubuntu-gnome-logo.plymouth
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu GNOME Remix 12.10 "Quantal Quetzal" - Beta amd64(20120926)
MachineType: System manufacturer Rampage Formula
ProcCmdLine: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-3.5.0-16-generic root=UUID=03fe6332-5278-4c93-8574-5b7e1175c407 ro quiet splash vt.handoff=7
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_GB:en
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcFB: 0 radeondrmfb
ProcKernelCmdLine: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-3.5.0-16-generic root=UUID=03fe6332-5278-4c93-8574-5b7e1175c407 ro quiet splash vt.handoff=7
SourcePackage: plymouth
TextPlymouth: /lib/plymouth/themes/ubuntu-gnome-text/ubuntu-gnome-text.plymouth
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)
dmi.bios.date: 02/20/2009
dmi.bios.vendor: American Megatrends Inc.
dmi.bios.version: 0803
dmi.board.asset.tag: To Be Filled By O.E.M.
dmi.board.name: Rampage Formula
dmi.board.vendor: ASUSTeK Computer INC.
dmi.board.version: Rev 1.xx
dmi.chassis.asset.tag: Asset-1234567890
dmi.chassis.type: 3
dmi.chassis.vendor: Chassis Manufacture
dmi.chassis.version: Chassis Version
dmi.modalias: dmi:bvnAmericanMegatrendsInc.:bvr0803:bd02/20/2009:svnSystemmanufacturer:pnRampageFormula:pvrSystemVersion:rvnASUSTeKComputerINC.:rnRampageFormula:rvrRev1.xx:cvnChassisManufacture:ct3:cvrChassisVersion:
dmi.product.name: Rampage Formula
dmi.product.version: System Version
dmi.sys.vendor: System manufacturer

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

please clarify what the error message is that you see.

[Chris Thompson (cpt23)]

I think the error message was:

'Error while mounting /media/Storage 1. Press S to skip mounting or M to [something]'

I'm afraid I installed Gnome remix over my Kubuntu install and Gnome remix doesn't bring up an error message. I can reinstall Kubuntu 12.10 if you need the exact message. Or is there a way to make Gnome remix display error messages on boot?

Apologies for the lack of details, it's the first Ubuntu bug report I've made.

[Chris Thompson (cpt23)]

I reinstalled Kubuntu 12.10 but strangely I don't get an error message anymore. As in Gnome the monitor receives no signal until I press 'S' twice to skip mounting the 2 drives.

[Andrew Gallagher (andrewg-l)]

I can confirm this bug.

I have two external drives in my fstab:

proc /proc proc nodev,noexec,nosuid 0 0
# / was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=a750d27d-ca00-4aa8-b154-a86c95c5054e / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1
# /vault was on /dev/sda6 during installation
UUID=214e350f-1b00-4f1d-b105-bf9a4696b367 /vault ext4 defaults 0 2
# swap was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=c26824e9-386f-4e7d-abaf-0040d8f7410e none swap sw 0 0
LABEL=LACIE\0401 /media/LACIE\0401 vfat defaults 0 2
LABEL=LACIE\0404 /media/LACIE\0404 ext4 defaults 0 2

On boot, I get the error message:

The disk drive for /media/LACIE 1 is not ready yet or not present. Continue to wait, or Press S to skip mounting or M for manual recovery

If I choose manual recovery, I can immediately invoke mount -a on the command line and both disks are mounted without complaint.

If I choose skip (for both external drives) the boot process continues, but I find once I log in that the drives have been auto-mounted on e.g. /media/LACIE 1_ (or 1__ or 1___, such caprice being why I put entries in fstab in the first place).

I am now going to relabel both these drives without spaces in their names as a workaround to see if this helps.

[Chris Thompson (cpt23)]

Yes, that was the exact error message that I received originally.

Relabeling the drives without spaces worked fine for me.

[Phil Hughes (phil-hughes)]

I also see this on a system upgraded to 12.10 from 12.04.

I have an ssd (system/home) and two internal hard drives, one for data and one for storing backups. There are two entries in fstab as follows:

UUID=2cb4aef5-637c-44fa-b7a2-d4ba52f98545 /media/data ext4 defaults 0 2
UUID=de6514b0-b7a9-49ca-a7ab-c19be1431636 /media/Backup\040Drive ext4 defaults 0 2

When I boot up, I just get a black screen. Pressing Ctrl-Alt-F1 then Ctrl-Alt-F7 gets me the X console (going straight to F7 doesn't work) which shows:

An error occured while mounting /media/Backup Drive.
Press S to skip mounting or M for manual recovery.

If I press S, booting continues ok.

data is mounted as expected with owner root, Backup Drive is mounted with owner phil.

(Unmounted, both /media/data and /media/Backup Drive have owner root and permissions 755).

The following is shown in /var/log/boot.log (file attached):

mountall: Event failed
mount: /dev/sdc1 already mounted or /media/Backup Drive busy
mount: according to mtab, /dev/sdc1 is already mounted on /media/Backup Drive
mountall: mount /media/Backup Drive [824] terminated with status 32
mountall: Filesystem could not be mounted: /media/Backup Drive

(If I comment out the line for Backup Drive, boot proceeds ok, it doesn't get mounted and there are no entries in boot.log).

This all worked fine in 12.04.

Two external drives which also have spaces in the names get mounted fine.

[OzzyFrank (ubuntu-ozzyfrank)]

Hi. I can confirm pretty much the same thing, being that my Windows XP partition could not be mounted on rebooting after the 12.10 upgrade, and it totally halted the system (I was given no "Press S to skip" option - the only keys that would do anything was Esc [toggle between showing Plymouth and verbose mode] and Ctrl+Alt+Del [reboot]).

Nothing is wrong with that NTFS partition, but the mount point does contain a space (/media/Windows XP), so it may be the "\040" issue. I booted with another drive and edited fstab (I simply commented out the whole line, as I had no idea if it was an issue with it mounting NTSF volumes or what not), and the system started fine (and the NTFS partition, being on the same drive as Ubuntu, was automatically mounted anyway).

Once upon an upgrade, I had to actually edit fstab and replace the spaces with "\040" in order to get affected volumes to be mounted again - now it seems that's the very cause of this issue. While I obviously got past this, this issue would surely stump those with less experience, especially as many would have no idea how to boot with a Live CD or other Ubuntu drive and successfully edit fstab (keeping in mind Ubuntu won't automatically mount another Ubuntu/Linux system partition, so you'd have to know how to do this manually, then edit fstab as root).

Also, it doesn't help that among the error messages it mentions nothing of spaces in the mount point, but states:

"The volume may already be mounted, or another software may use it..."
"mountall: File system could not be mounted /media/Windows XP"

[Pascal De Vuyst (pascal-devuyst)]

[OzzyFrank] it totally halted the system (I was given no "Press S to skip" option - the only keys that would do anything was Esc [toggle between showing Plymouth and verbose mode] and Ctrl+Alt+Del [reboot]
[Pascal] What graphics card do you have (lspci -vnn | grep VGA)? Did you try to blacklist you graphics card in /boot/grub/gfxblacklist.txt and then running sudo update-grub2 ?

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

This is basically bug #1059471: the entry that gets added to /proc/self/mountinfo doesn't match mountall's view of the mountpoint name (because getmntent() unescapes the string), so as a result mountall doesn't know it's mounted due to the previous bug.

Once that bug is fixed, I see that mountall adds two entries to /etc/mtab for such filesystems (if mounted before / is mounted rw), because it still doesn't know they're the same filesystem. But nobody seems to have been concerned about this issue before now; if anyone here is, feel free to file a separate bug report for it.

[Phil Hughes (phil-hughes)]

Version 2.42ubuntu0.1 has fixed this for me.

Strangely, mountall --version still reports the version as 2.39.
Software Centre and dpkg -s both report 2.42.

[OzzyFrank (ubuntu-ozzyfrank)]

Pascal - the graphics card info is as follows:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: NVIDIA Corporation G84 [GeForce 8600 GT] [10de:0402] (rev a1) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])

Forgive my lack of expertise in these matters, but I have no idea about blacklisting video cards, like why I would even need to do that (actually, to a novice like me it kind of sounds dangerous, hehe). Looking at the blacklist examples in /boot/grub/gfxblacklist.txt, I can't even see what part of the above info I'd have to put in. I assume this has something to do with why my boot utterly fails when it can't mount /media/Windows\040XP, rather than give me the option to skip and just resume boot. Once again, forgive my ignorance about why a mount failure and video card issue could be related.

Anyway, all I can say is that while playing with the values in fstab and using mount -a to see if any changes work, everything I do still ends with the error: [mntent]: line 1 in /etc/fstab is bad

Whether I use spaces, \040 instead of spaces, and quotes around the path of both of those or not, there is still no way for me to mount those with spaces. I know the short answer is just to change the mount points to those with no spaces, but the reason I have not done that is that I have so many links and bookmarks etc pointing to "Windows XP" - not to mention in a VirtualBox WinXP appliance where so much is tied to the physical WinXP partition - it would cause me too much hassle to change the mount point to "Windows_XP" (Ubuntu's automount recognises the partition's label of "Windows XP", and while I have to manually mount that, all my links/bookmarks then work, and I just have to remember to do that before loading my WinXP virtual machine, otherwise it too spits the dummy and fails to load).

PS: my mountall version is now 2.42ubuntu0.4, but still no luck.