How to force umount a NFS directory on Linux?

Posted on by Eric Ma In QA

The NFS server is down. It is reported “Stale NFS file handle”. I tried ‘umount’ and ‘umount -f’. But neither succeeded.

# umount /mnt/store
umount.nfs: /mnt/store: Stale NFS file handle
# umount -f /mnt/store
umount.nfs: /mnt/store: Stale NFS file handle

How to force umounting the NFS without rebooting the Linux server?

I usually have to reboot the server at this kind of situations. Normal reboot command may get the server stuck there and you have to get there to manually reset it using the server button.

This trick may be useful to hard reset the server: http://ask.systutorials.com/370/force-linux-to-reboot

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Eric Ma

Eric is a systems guy. Eric is interested in building high-performance and scalable distributed systems and related technologies. The views or opinions expressed here are solely Eric's own and do not necessarily represent those of any third parties.

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