One of my favorite error messages comes from Unix.  It's definitely one of those where, if you don't know what it actually means, you would never guess.

The message is  mount: stale file handle

What this actually means is that you mounted a file system remotely -- e.g., a disk on another computer.  This file system had previously been mounted on the local system, and then the physical connection between the local machine and the remote device was broken without unmounting the remote file system.

What the mount command is saying to you is, "I believe that this file system is already mounted, but I can't talk to it."  What you have to do is make sure that the physical connection is reestablished, unmount the file system, and then remount it.

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