Error trying to access a Unity Catalog (UC) volume path from a non-UC compute

Use a UC-enabled compute to access volumes in Databricks.

Written by priyanshi.david

Last published at: June 11th, 2025

Problem

When attempting to access a Unity Catalog (UC) volume path from a non-UC compute, you receive the following error.

com.databricks.backend.daemon.data.common.InvalidMountException: Error while using path /Volumes/{path-to-your-volume} for creating file system within mount at '/Volumes/{path-to-your-volume}'.

 

Upon reviewing the driver logs or the error stack trace, you find the following message.

Caused by: java.lang.IllegalStateException: No Unity API token found in Unity Scope

 

Cause

You are using a non-UC compute to access volumes. Since the compute does not support Unity Catalog, it cannot retrieve the required Unity API token, causing the error.

 

Solution

To access Unity Catalog volumes, you must use a Unity Catalog-enabled compute.

 

For more information, refer to the What are Unity Catalog volumes? (AWS | Azure | GCP) and Compute configuration reference (AWS | Azure | GCP) documentation.