This error is typically seen in a system which has active NFS mount point. The NFS protocol doesn’t define any automatic way of communication for any change of NFS server configuration. For example, if a client system mounts an NFS volume and the Administrator at the NFS server removes the directory from the NFS exported list, The client system will not know the change of configuration at NFS server side. In such cases, the ‘df’ command starts showing this error ‘Stale NFS file handle’.

As your system is NFS client, you can unmount the previously mounted NFS volume using ‘-f‘ option which does forceful unmounting of the volume. Of course, the “-f” is intended for NFS mounted volumes but not for other volumes like partitions of local hard drive.

For example, your NFS mount point is “/nfsdir”, the error you would notice will be as follows:

[root@techpulp /]# ls -l
total 154
drwxr-xr-x   2 root   root    4096 2009-02-10 12:58 bin
drwxr-xr-x   5 root   root    1024 2009-05-08 15:33 boot
drwxr-xr-x  15 root   root    4760 2009-05-13 10:37 dev
drwxr-xr-x 139 root   root   12288 2009-05-13 10:37 etc
drwxr-xr-x   5 root   root    4096 2009-03-06 14:59 home
drwxr-xr-x  17 root   root   12288 2009-03-04 17:36 lib
drwx------   2 root   root   16384 2009-01-06 16:26 lost+found
drwxr-xr-x   2 root   root    4096 2009-05-13 10:09 media
drwxr-xr-x   2 root   root    4096 2008-09-06 15:43 mnt
drwxr-xr-x   5 root   root    4096 2009-05-13 10:09 opt
dr-xr-xr-x 231 root   root       0 2009-05-08 15:38 proc
drwxr-x---  24 root   root    4096 2009-05-13 15:32 root
drwxr-xr-x   2 root   root   12288 2009-02-10 12:58 sbin
drwxr-xr-x   2 root   root    4096 2009-01-06 16:30 selinux
drwxrwxrwt  37 root   root    4096 2009-05-14 09:54 tmp
drwxr-xr-x  13 root   root    4096 2009-01-06 16:35 usr
drwxr-xr-x  24 root   root    4096 2009-01-06 16:51 var
ls: cannot access nfsdir: Stale NFS file handle
[root@techpulp /]#

Now you can just unmount the NFS volume using “-f” command.

[root@techpulp /]# umount -f /nfsdir
umount.nfs: Server failed to unmount '192.168.45.67:/nfsdir'
[root@techpulp /]#

You can attempt to mount the NFS volume again if you are sure that it is mountable:

[root@techpulp /]# mount 192.168.45.67:/nfsdir /nfsdir -t nfs