How to access a directory content when another has been mounted on it?

Question

There is an existing directory called /home containing some files. I have mounted a partition on this directory using /etc/fstab

UUID=10CD7304CE71E381   /home      ntfs    defaults        0       2

Nothing wrong so far.

How do I access the original content of /home without unmounting anything. Obviously, I cannot unmount the mounted /home partition.

Answer 1

Simple answer: use a live system.

If another partition has been mounted on your root's /home, indeed you cannot simply unmount it, or even re-bind the mount. However, a live system has it's own /home/ arranged for and doesn't use the partition that normally provides your root filesystem. So on the live system, simply mount your root filesystem and you can access the original /home directory from there.

Finding a live system shouldn't be difficult, because there are quite a few distributions that provide a live CD image that you can burn on CD, or put on a USB drive to boot from there. Some of the distributions that offer this are Debian, Knoppix and MX Linux.

Answer 2

On Linux, you can do it by unmounting that directory in a separate mount namespace with its mount propagation flag set to private:

# truncate -s 3G blob
# mkfs.ext4 blob
...

# mkdir dir
# echo below > dir/file

# mount blob dir
# echo above > dir/file

# cat dir/file
above

# unshare --mount --fork --propagation private sh -c 'umount dir; cat dir/file'
below

# cat dir/file
above

# unshare --mount --fork --propagation private sh -c '
   umount dir
   for f in dir/file /dev/fd/7; do
       realpath --relative-to=. "$f"; cat "$f"
   done
' 7<dir/file
dir/file
below
dir/file
above

Note: the --propagation private flag is the default, at least with recent versions of unshare(1): I have added it just for emphasis.