[Debian-eeepc-devel] Root filesystem not cleanly unmounted on shutdown with Lenny on SD card in SD slot

[Delbert Franz]

I have had great success in using the DebianEeePC Wiki,
and have installed Lenny on an SD card in the SD slot. 
That works well, and a 16 GB SDHC card from Adata seems to be 
quite adequate.  I have wireless working with WPA_Supplicant. 
I have not updated the ACPI yet because what I need works OK 
without it for the moment. 

One pernicious problem occurs however.  On shutdown, something
is preventing the proper shutdown of the root filesystem.  
I sometimes get a message: "mount: / is busy" and there is never
any message about the stopping of the scsi bus that 
is connected to the SD slot (/dev/sdb on my machine).
I always get a message to the screen about that for /dev/sda.

On the next boot from the SD card, I get complaints that the 
root file system was not clean!  The journal seems to fix the 
problem and the boot process goes as usual, albeit with a delay.  If I use
reiserfs on the boot partition, the journal can take a loong
time to finish, and I believe eventually I get a boot failure after
many shutdowns and reboots.  That has not happened so far with ext3. 

I have searched for other reports of this problem and I have found none.
 
As a check, I put the SD card in a USB 2.0 reader, plugged it into my 
Inspiron 1000 laptop, and was able to boot into a console, shutdown, 
and reboot again and repeat, and no such message about the root filesystem being
"unclean" appeared(Except for the first time, when the root partition was 
left in an unclean state from the EeePC).  This worked well with both reiserfs and ext3
as the filesystem on the root partition.  Thus there seems to be something 
specific to the EeePC involved here. 

Any hints at what needs to be modified to get a clean shutdown of the
root filesystem when booting from the SD slot?

                                       Delbert