Force unmount of NFS-mounted directory

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I have an NFS-mounted directory on a Linux machine that has hung. I've tried to force an unmount, but it doesn't seem to work:

$ umount -f /mnt/data
$ umount2: Device or resource busy
$ umount: /mnt/data: device is busy

If I type "mount", it appears that the directory is no longer mounted, but it hangs if I do "ls /mnt/data", and if I try to remove the mountpoint, I get:

$ rmdir /mnt/data
rmdir: /mnt/data: Device or resource busy

Is there anything I can do other than reboot the machine?

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1 Answer

Your NFS server disappeared.

Ideally your best bet is if the NFS server comes back.

If not, the "umount -f" should have done the trick. It doesn't ALWAYS work, but it often will.

If you happen to know what processes are USING the NFS filesystem, you could try killing those processes and then maybe an unmount would work.

Finally, I'd guess you need to reboot.

Also, DON'T soft-mount your NFS drives. You use hard-mounts to guarantee that they worked. That's necessary if you're doing writes.

answered 2008-09-15T16:06:19.490

Force unmount of NFS-mounted directory

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