I have posted a very similar question in lustre-discuss but the lack of responses made me move to the developers. I created an OST (while clients were still active). I then mounted the OST, and it states the OST''s services are already running but nothing is showing up on /etc/mtab. I suspect this is a bug. Therefore, I submitted a bug report. https://bugzilla.lustre.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18651 But, meanwhile, is there a way to override this by changing a flag in ost''s configuration (writeconf) to say, its not mouted up? This will hopefully enable me to mount up partition as intended. TIA