Q. I am trying to unmount remotely hosted Linux server. I have CD mounted and when ever I type command umount /cdrom or umount /dev/cdrom I get an error that read as follows:
unmount: /cdrom device is busy
How do I solve this problem?
A. In order to solve this problem. Run umount command as follows:
# cd /
# umount /cdrom
If problem still continues then forcefully unmount the cdrom:
# cd /
# fuser -km /cdrom
OR try the following command:
# cd /
# umount -l /mnt
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{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
What happens basically, is that Linux will not allow you to unmount a device that is busy. There are many reasons for this, but the most important one is to prevent data loss.
Next time you are stuck with this message, try the following command to find out what processes have activities on the device/partition
My primary optical drive is /dev/hda, and I would do a (as root)
lsof -b | grep “/dev/hda”
Of which the result is
k3b 30396 andy 19r BLK 3,0 6545 /dev/hda
This tells me that user andy has a process running (k3b) that is using the primary optical drive (hda)
As soon as that program terminates its task, the device will no longer be busy and I can unmount it.
For more information, see man lsof