[SLL] unable to mount old drive when it's secondary

[Ana]

Hi.

This problem has been bugging me for months now.  I have not found any
leads.  it goes like this:

I bought a new system, more or less.  I took the drive out of my old
system, and installed it as a secondary drive in the new.  Most
everything about this new system works pretty well, though there are a
couple bugs.  (right now I'm trying out the very latest kernel to see if
I can make it crash...  so far so good.)  some details: old system was
32-bit, AMD and the new is 64-bit Athlon X2... dual core... yadda.  The
new disk has AMD64 Debian Etch installed and the old has 32-bit Debian.

so.  I really think I should be able to mount my old partitions, but it
doesn't work.

root at betty:/# mount -t ext3 /dev/sdb1 /mnt
mount: /dev/sdb1 already mounted or /mnt busy
root at betty:/# cat /proc/mounts | grep sdb
root at betty:/# lsof -n | grep mnt
root at betty:/# 

What's more interesting is I am able to read the drive.  I can dd my old
file systems into files on my new drive and mount them on a loop device.
So...  the drive is definitely readable, the media is sound, the
file systems are intact.  I just can't mount the drive partitions
directly.  All file system on three partitions have this same problem...
two are ext3 and one is vfat.  I also cannot use the swap partition.

Also, I can place my old drive in the sda position and boot from it.
 From there (my old 32-bit Debian), I am able to mount my new drive
(which by then in the sdb position).

It occurred to me today that my old drive is SATA-1 and my new drive is
SATA-2.  dmesg indicates that the kernel recognizes this and seems to
initialize each properly.  I wonder though, when SATA-2 is being used as
the primary drive (with the 3Gb speeds), is it problematic to mount a
partition on a SATA-1 at a necessarily slower speed?  Is this a known
limitation or bug?  Perhaps my hardware is somehow unusual?

I have 6 SATA sockets on this new main-board.  One thing I haven't tried
is plugging the two drives into slots that are very distant from one
another.  dmesg suggests that the 6 might be grouped in 2's...  so maybe
three SATA controllers for 6 slots?  I'll try plugging the slower drive
into the last slot to see if that changes anything, tomorrow.

uummm...  I can mount DVD's and CD's in my IDE, DVD drive.  I can mount
usb storage devices.  hm...  I might have another SATA drive around here
too.  Maybe I'll drop that in to see if I can make that work, tomorrow.

I hope someone has heard something about a situation like mine.  I'm
pretty close to to joining some kernel mailing list and irritating the
coders...  which I really don't enjoy.

Thanks for your help,

- Ana