I had been inserting a sequence of USB keys to see what was on them, and pretty sure the sde1 interface was used at some point. But no keys are inserted at present. I also just did a cross installation onto an attached hard disk and so its directories were mounted locally on /mnt and I had chroot'ed into its root directory. I suspect this was close in time to when my root partition became filled. I unmounted these partitions and I closed the chroot terminal. To avoid confusion I should note that in what follows, my currently running disk is /dev/sdb, while the new cross installation was to /dev/sda. That is, /dev/sda is the newer disk. I should also note that /home, /usr, /var and /tmp partitions are broken out.
$ cat /proc/mounts rootfs / rootfs rw 0 0 sysfs /sys sysfs rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime 0 0 proc /proc proc rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime 0 0 udev /dev devtmpfs rw,relatime,size=10240k,nr_inodes=188865,mode=755 0 0 devpts /dev/pts devpts rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,gid=5,mode=620,ptmxmode=000 0 0 tmpfs /run tmpfs rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,size=1647748k,mode=755 0 0 /dev/disk/by-uuid/b0673fe5-e6b2-42a5-9121-5fcf32b7135d / \ ext4 rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro,user_xattr,barrier=1,data=ordered 0 0 tmpfs /run/lock tmpfs rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,size=5120k 0 0 tmpfs /run/shm tmpfs rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,size=9545360k 0 0 /dev/sdb5 /home ext4 rw,relatime,user_xattr,barrier=1,data=ordered 0 0 ... $ ls -la /sys/block/sde lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 May 9 05:30 /sys/block/sde -> ../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb1/1-3/1-3.3/1-3.3:1.0/host7/target7:0:0/ \ 7:0:0:1/block/sde This is similar to the return from other interfaces. # blockdev --report /dev/sde RO RA SSZ BSZ StartSec Size Device rw 256 512 4096 0 0 /dev/sde # blockdev --report /dev/sde1 RO RA SSZ BSZ StartSec Size Device blockdev: cannot open /dev/sde1: No such file or directory # grep sde1 /var/log/dmesg [nothing] Juergen suggested deleting /dev/sde1 it after backing it up. That was my first inclination, but kinda hard to do if /dev/sde1 is not visible. I also considered just rebooting, but thought best to find out what the problem is, and who knows I might not be able to boot. I have a second bootable disk on the machine that automatically mounts the partitions on my problematic drive on /mnt/debian/...., and so I can boot it and access the current drive's partitions. Haines