OK, so I thought I had it. I killed the stray fam process and could mount and unmount the drive at will. At least until I rebooted the machine. Every time I do, xinetd restarts this fam thing and I can't unmount the drive without killing it. If I restart xinetd using /etc/inetd/xinetd restart, I can mount and unmount the drive. I don't understand why xinetd (or perhaps more properly, the service sgi_fam) feels the need to start fam when I boot up, but forgets all about it if I restart xinetd. Reinstalling the rpms for xinetd and fam did not fix it. Workarounds would include disabling the sgi_fam service, or having one of my local initscripts just restart xinetd, but that's somewhat unsatisfactory. If something is damaged, I'd rather fix it. Right now, I've disabled the sgi_fam service. It seems someone is telling sgi_fam that it needs to fire up fam to look at this drive (hda1, on /mnt/winc) when I boot. I'd like to make it stop, but I don't know how it's happening. Any suggestions very welcome. Thanks again, Rob