Unable to mount /home partition

[delcypher]

Well your home partition isn't even being listed in the list of UUIDs.

I don't know what Ubuntu uses for default home partition encryption.

To find out if it is LUKS you can run

sudo cryptsetup luksDump /dev/sda6

and see what the output is.

You can try finding out your UUID for the home partition another way

sudo blkid /dev/sda6

You may just want to edit /etc/fstab for you now and just have the line

# /home was on /dev/sda6 during installation
/dev/sda6 /home ext4 defaults 0 2

instead of the UUID. I can't guarantee this will work though as I don't know how the encryption is working.

Oh quick edit - I've found something about encryption in ubuntu -->http://bodhizazen.net/Tutorials/Ecryptfs/
Apparently uses ecryptfs. This means your home partition should just mount normally.

[doas777]

you do have a few extra partitions in your fdisk output. is one of them your old home?

[al_mic]

# sudo cryptsetup luksDump /dev/sda6

Command failed: /dev/sda6 is not a LUKS partition

# sudo blkid /dev/sda6
#

There is nothing displayed.


I did place that line in /etc/fstab with /dev/sda6 instead of UUID and ...


WOW !!!


at first it showed that error message (now with sda6 instead of UUID):
"One or more of the mounts listed in /etc/fstab cannot yet be mounted:
/home: waiting for /dev/sda6
Press ESC to enter a recovery shell"


but after a few seconds it disappeared and showed me the login prompt.

I am now on my Desktop!

Thank you so much!
Thank you all!

[al_mic]

you do have a few extra partitions in your fdisk output. is one of them your old home?

/dev/sda1 is / (a primary partition)
/dev/sda2 is a logical partition and it contains the swap and /home
/dev/sda5 is swap partition
/dev/sda6 is /home

Thank you for helping me!

[delcypher]

Hmm not sure the problem is entirely fixed. I'm not sure why your home partition has no UUID.

[al_mic]

After restarting the computer once more, that error message was no longer displayed.

So I switched in /etc/fstab the lines for /home partition, by commenting the line with /dev/sda6 and uncommenting the line with
UUID=eccb7cbf-618a-4e03-aafe-634b4ca0a918

After restarting the computer, an error message was again displayed, the same one, with
"One or more of the mounts listed in /etc/fstab cannot yet be mounted:
/home: waiting for UUID=eccb7cbf-618a-4e03-aafe-634b4ca0a918"

but this message was there only for a few seconds and the my login prompt was showed.

And then, just to check, I restarted the computer once more, and this time no error message was displayed.

ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid now shows :

total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2009-11-14 13:15 7bba7a29-e1da-461d-8fcd-414610f910db -> ../../sda5
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2009-11-14 13:15 82c68f35-e68a-4cd1-af3e-cb503b1cf7e5 -> ../../sda1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2009-11-14 13:15 eccb7cbf-618a-4e03-aafe-634b4ca0a918 -> ../../sda6

So it is good.

[OnuJack]

I encountered the same kind of problem

Out of the blue the system was not able to mount the partition with my home folder. At first I noticed that it took some time mount a partition (did not note which one exactly it was).

I did everything in this thread and it worked out exatly the same way as it did with the author of this thread.

The only difference being - I did not use any encryption for the home partition.

I also used the disk utility to see what it reports. The funny thing is that before I mounted the home partition with /dev/sda it reported the partition as unknown or unrecognized. After mounting using /dev/sda it showed correct information again. As the author of this thread did - I too finally changed the fstab entry back to uuid and now it works again as normal.

Have no clue what caused this behaviour. Might the disk be failing? SMART status is fine, but experience shows that it can not predict very well in some cases.

Thanks for the help guys

[stevetxt]

I had this same problem and fixed it by the method in this thread. But the uuid for my home partition did not show up in the lists again until the next morning. I have not been able to find the cause as it seems to strike people out of the blue. I think it might have something to do with upstart or udev losing the uuid on a particular startup, and udev only restarts periodically, not on every boot. The problem for me showed up when i was setting up to make a presentation and restarted with the projector connected. It was kind of annoying as I had to switch to the "other side" in my dual boot for the occasion. It would be great if someone could explain where this problem comes from, as it seems to have affected quite a few.

[ludovicc]

Count me in, I had also this problem and managed to recover from it thanks to this thread. The timing is suspect, several people affected at the same time, was there a security update which caused this issue?

I'm running a dual boot Ubuntu Karmic 64bits with ext4 on my / and /home partitions, and Vista

[sjosul]

I had the same issue - solved thanks to this thread. It's never happened before, and as far as I can tell there were only three differences to my usual usage:

1. Fresh Karmic install, updating the Kernel straight from 2.6.31-14 to 17. Previous installation the updates were incremental
2. I had just set up two additional users on the system
3. I had used fast user switching

These may all be coincidence.