"Cannot remove directory" on unmount due to stale .hal-mtab entries

Argh, forgot to mention that the unmounting actually does work, despite the error dialog. So the bug is that the error dialog appears for no reason.

Also, the "writing data to device" notification bubble never disappears unless manually clicked on.

Thank you for your bug. To work on by somebody getting the issue, likely to send upstream

This is caused by stale entries in /media/.hal-mtab confusing /usr/lib/hal/hal-storage-unmount. It calls umount(8) with the device name, but when it tries to remove the directory it uses the directory name in the first entry matching the device name, which fails. The directory is later removed by /usr/lib/hal/hal-storage-cleanup-mountpoint, which for some reason manages to find the right entry in /media/.hal-mtab.

Here's a patch that fixes it for this case, by making sure the mount point in /media/.hal-mtab matches the one in the LibHalVolume object.

This only works if libhal-storage can get the volume from the UDI, but that seems to be the case when using gnome-unmount.

On Mon, Apr 09, 2007 at 05:46:53PM -0000, Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker wrote:
> Here's a patch that fixes it for this case, by making sure the mount
> point in /media/.hal-mtab matches the one in the LibHalVolume object.

Thanks! Would this be appropriate to send upstream?

--
Ilmari Vacklin
<email address hidden>

hi, i' using up to date feisty and the bug is still not fixed :-((

Looks to me like UTF-8 in a volume name trips things up. iPods get named things like "Steve's iPod" by default, where the apostrophe is somewhere up in Unicode space. I got a three-number \nnn\nnn\nnn sequence in .hal-mtab in place of the apostrophe, and saw this problem. When I wiped .hal-mtab, rebooted (maybe unnecessary, I'm new to Ubuntu and didn't know how to restart gnome-volume-manager) and renamed the iPod (using a Mac) to an all-ASCII name this problem went away for me.

Check the encoding and decoding of the mountpoint pathname in .hal-mtab.

Confirm this as described by swork.

However it also fills the /media directory with directories like:

/media/Mat's iPod
/media/Mat's iPod_
/media/Mat's iPod__
/media/Mat's iPod___

Obviously there is an error with the encoding in .hal-mtab.

Changing my iPod to MatPod cured the problem.#

Matthew

Hi

I've removed the file /media/.hal-mtab and the problem is gone.

I have an iaudio u2 player.

thanks!

Removal of /media/.hal-mtab also works here (using Ericsson k750i phone).

Can someone who knows link the upstream bug here?

Perhaps we should also update the description. It looks to me like this is reproducible by plugging in USB sticks with different volume names.

Does it only happen when there are stale entries?

I was getting this same error.
Cannot Unmount Volume
Cannot Remove Directory

Removing /media/.hal-mtab fixed the problem.
It does seem to only happen when there are stale entries in /media/.hal-mtab
I'm guessing it was from having multiple drives plugged in.

I had the same problem with Gutsy Gibbon. Removing the /media/.hal-mtab fixed the problem. There was an old entry that contained german umlauts like "ö" and "ä".

Also solved it on Gutsy Gibbon by removing /media/.hal-mtab. I didn't have any strange things in there though. I got the problem a few weeks ago when I was using Feisty.

I also noticed this problem in Gutsy, so I backed up my .hal-mtab and .hal-mtab-lock files, removed the originals and everything's working fine. I think it was due to 'stale entries' and wonder if it could be related to the fact that I formatted this drive and renamed it so it's mounted under a different name.

Worked for me in Gutsy also...

Another satisfied user of this fix (with Gutsy) here.

The patch needs some cleanup (should use a new variable for the libhal_volume_get_mount_point() result, otherwise it compares possibly wrong values in the next iteration), but I forwarded it to upstream for a general comment.

Affects quite a lot of people.

IMHO /media/.hal-mtab should move to /var/run/hal-mtab, and in addition we should apply a fixed version of this patch.

in my case i have two optical drive:
CD-ROM and DVD-RW

When i use CD-ROm i don't have any problems with unmount drives.
When i use DVD-RW - i can't normally unmount CD or DVD.

I noticed that in file /media/.hal-mtab there was a line containing label of one my discs. Label consists of characters specified to my language (polish) so label was a strange name. I just remove this line and everything is now OK.

Regards
Pawel

/etc/init.d/mtab.sh should remove the file on boot. No need to keep them forever.

This bug was fixed in the package sysvinit - 2.86.ds1-14.1ubuntu43

---------------
sysvinit (2.86.ds1-14.1ubuntu43) hardy; urgency=low

  * debian/initscripts/etc/init.d/mtab.sh: Remove /media/.hal-mtab on boot, to
    avoid building up cruft when device name change, etc. (LP: #95368)

 -- Martin Pitt <email address hidden> Thu, 03 Apr 2008 15:13:51 +0200

I am having a similar problem to comment 8 except dealing with a Lacie D2 Quadra drive on Hardy. Does sysvinit need to be installed for the fix, or will the fix for hal solve it when it comes around?

I re-open this bug.
The upgrade of sysvinit 2.86.ds1-14.1ubuntu43 create a bug for me.

Using an external usb DD (with NTFS) labeled "Lacie".

If i unmount it with nautilus->no problem. If i reboot system without unmounting it with nautilus, after reboot my external is mounted on /media/Lacie_ and i have an empty dir /media/Lacie. After 2 reboots i have /media/Lacie /media/Lacie_ and /media/Lacie__ (the external DD)

So I think the patch is not so good Pitti ;-)

Agreed. This patch definitely has the undesired side-effect Patrice mentions. It should be easy enough to add an rmdir (please not an rm -r, that could be disastrous) to the patch.

Something more specific to the actual problem would be more appropriate, of course.

Confirmed also with another external USB DD with Ext3 and VFAT partitions

This created a regression, see bug 101845, so milestoning.

I reverted the sysvinit change which caused this bug. To clean this up locally on your system, please remove empty unused mount points in /media manually (no way to do it automatically in a safe fashion, sorry).

Package uploaded, awaiting RM approval.

This bug was fixed in the package sysvinit - 2.86.ds1-14.1ubuntu44

---------------
sysvinit (2.86.ds1-14.1ubuntu44) hardy; urgency=low

  * debian/initscripts/etc/init.d/mtab.sh: Revert previous change of cleaning
    /media/.hal-mtab, since hal does not (and cannot easily) remove mount
    point directories on shutdown, but also considers already existing mount
    points as not usable for dynamic mounts (since they potentially conflict
    with fstab). Patching hal properly is too intrusive at this point.
    (LP: #101845, LP: #95368)

 -- Martin Pitt <email address hidden> Mon, 14 Apr 2008 11:53:21 +0200

I'm seeing this in Intrepid, with:

kernel 2.6.27-4-generic amd64,
sysvinit-utils 2.86.ds1-59ubuntu8,
hal 0.5.11-3~ubuntu8.

Is this a regression?

Incidentally, if you leave the message box up that says 'Cannot unmount the volume...', eventually you get another message saying:

"DBus error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken."

Ok, I can remove the .hal-mtab, but then what? unplugging and replugging my disks isn't mounting them at all anymore. /etc/init.d/hald restart doesn't seem to help either. :(

Experiencing still in Intrepid beta, which was just upgraded from Hardy. (Hardy was also upgraded from Gutsy).

Thanks for the work so far, Martin. If this does involve config files, we'll need this to be automatically cleaned up during the upgrade process.

No unused mount points on my system in /media except cdrom and cdrom0 (which if I recall correctly behave a tad differently).
This happens for me with any disk that mounts to /media/disk.

Encountered this bug on 8.04.1:

$ umount /media/32_00_00
/sbin/umount.hal: Unmounting /media/32_00_00 failed: org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Volume.UnknownFailure: Cannot remove directory

Removed the /media/.hal-mtab and it now works without problems.

Hardy 8.04.1 is infected for me too.

And removing the /media/.hal-mtab solves the problem just the same.

I found this report by googling, having this problem with an up to date Hardy box. I have this issue for quite a long time, don't really remember since when.

My .hal-mtab file is attached, and moving it to .bak makes the warning disappear. The new .hal-mtab created is equal to the old one, except for the line corresponding to the other drive, and has same file and ownership permissions (755 root.root).

I see the hal section of the bug is still open, can I help test or debug anything? I didn't see any errors or warnings in dmesg, kern.log, messages, syslog, or daemon.log in /var/log.

GNOME in Karmic does not use hal for mounting any more, and the sysvinit workaround solved this bug sufficiently.

Bug confirmed on a fully patched (even some backports) 10.04.4 with dolphin.

Workaround (without need for commandline):
Options "safely remove" and "eject drive" do work normally from nautilus.

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/hal/