General :: Usb/external Drive Problems Redux - Read-only - Does This Suggest Device Failure
May 22, 2010
I initially thought the problem had to do with the Lucid Lynx upgrade, a lot of people have been reporting similar issues with drive mapping and things along those line. My issue is that an external drive, formatted in FAT32 appears to be corrupted, and overtime begins to read or mounts as 'read-only.'
What I've read, and deduced, is that this is ultimately and issue with the drive. I've backed it up, reformatted, and been able to write to the drive successfully, but I've been moving a lot of files (backing up) and the system has been reporting input/output errors in transferring some files (through the GUI).
The only thing I can think of, is that the device itself is corrupted or damaged, and that I need to be thinking of other back-up options for the future. Any suggestions on disk-doctoring? I'm hoping to do a clean-install of the OS once I back up my files manually.
I was in the process of backing up data from my hard drive to an external usb drive when the drive suddenly became read only. Does anyone know how I can make it read/write again? I am using Debian Lenny and the drive is ntfs formatted. I have another ntfs formatted usb drive that is not effected in this way.
I administer a remote server via SSH that runs CentOS 5.5. I have been unsuccessful in all my attempts to write to two different external USB hard drives with a single ext3 partition when logged in as root.
When attempting to create a "test" directory I get one of two messages:
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Both drives *appear* to have filesystem issues. When I run an fsck on either drive, I get:
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Keep in mind this is a newly-formatted, empty drive.
Not putting stock in the odds that I've had two hard drives (different sizes and brands) with the exact same hardware problem, I'm going to assume this is a software issue, although maybe it isn't. Hence, my post in "Linux - General". I've heard talk elsewhere of controller (chipset) issues coming into play. Is this valid?
Okay, here's the information you'll need to make a diagnosis....
Here's the output of a "df -h" command:
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Here's the contents of my /etc/fstab:
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Here's the output of "cat /etc/mtab":
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Here's the output of a mount command:
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Here's the output of fdisk on the device in question:
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The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 48641.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024, and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)
Command (m for help):
I've got someone with access to the box if necessary. But it might take days to implement solutions since this isn't his full-time job. Remote solutions are, therefore, preferable.
I have a Linux application(ProMAX 5000) running in a virtual Machine on my windows OS. I am using an external Hard drive of 250G in ext2 file system as my device for large data read, write & execute file system. I have already mounted the device from /etc/fstab. But i want my application to access this device as a Primary data storage device OR Secondary storage device. What command will i invoke to partition this 250G drive as my primary or secondary storage device.
My wife is purchasing a netbook with no internal CD/DVD writing device, so we plan to purchase an external CD/DVD USB-2.0 read/write device. Our local PC shop has the following 3 external USB-2.0 DVD read/write devices:
(a) Samsung DVD-Burner SE-S084F/RSBS [not listed on Samsung site - too old ? ]
(b) LG DVD-Burner GE24NU21 USB2.0 [not listed on LG site - too old ? ]
(c) Super-Multi Portable DVD Rewrite (GP10 Lite USB2.0 Slimline) GP10NB20 (mentions Mac OS/X support, which is encouraging)
None of those are listed in the openSUSE HCL. Has anyone successfully used any of these with GNU/Linux (my google surfing on this revealed no GNU/Linux complaint nor any success stories) ? Or is there another such external USB-2.0 read/write DVD burner device that is recommended ?
The external hard drive which contains all my photos and where I backed-up all my important documents is no longer recognized. It is a three month old 500GB Iomage Prestige Desktop Hard Drive.When I plug it in, it is recognised as a USB device, because it shows up when I type lsusb, but dmesg gives this error message.
[19712.013250] usb 2-2: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 21 [19712.145347] usb 2-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice [19712.147214] scsi25 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
[code]....
I popped the disk out of the casing put it on a SATA connect internally and then tried the file recovery programs testdisk/photorec and SpinRite, but both failed because they couldn't recognize the external hard disk.
I've had a look at some similar threads but as I'm very new to linux they're already a bit technical for me. Sorry, this calls for someone with patience. I gather from other threads that disconnecting an external drive without unmounting is a no-no, and this seems to be the likely cause. Now the disk is read only and I'm unable to change any settings through the usual control panel on ubuntu. I'm just not familiar with the terminal instructions. I tried to cut and past a few command lines from other threads but I got some warnings that proceding could damage data. Like this one: WARNING! Running e2fsck on a mounted filesystem may cause SEVERE filesystem damage.
Been happily going along with Lucid Lynx, locked in, no problems. Slowly sorting through many files on an external 500 GB USB drive, moving into useful sub-folders. Today, I cannot write to any folders on that drive -- read only. ?!?! I run nautilus as root, still no joy. (Using nautilus GUI to browse files to move to other folders.. how can I change these settings to allow me to be able to write to this drive again?
Short version: How do I reformat an external hard-drive (read-only, NFTS) so that I can rw to it.
Long version: I had a self-built Ubuntu desktop that is now dead. I have pulled out the hard-drives and have bought one of the connector's to convert the SATA cable to USB so I can put the data on my Mac. Unfortunately, my Mac is not able to read the hard-drive for some reason... So, I've decided to boot my old Ubuntu laptop to pull the files from the SATA drive to an external drive then hopefully connect that external drive to transfer the files to the Mac. The external drive is currently formatted as NFTS and I'm unable to reformat it with gparted--I'm guessing that's because it's read-only mode...?
Ubuntu ext3 SATA -> connector -> Mac OS X
or
Ubuntu ext3 SATA -> connector -> Ubuntu ext3 laptop -> external NFTS HD -> Mac OS X
I have a computer with Ubuntu 10.04, with few disk space. For downloading some torrents, I've connected a USB hardrive, ext4 formated. But this idea wasn't a solution, because the drive keeps getting read-only permission... Is there any way of prevent this to happen?
I am using Thunar and XFCE4. I started with the minimal install CD, so this is not exactly Xubuntu as I do not have Xubuntu-desktop package installed. I installed psydm to be able to easily edit and control mounting, fstab etc... Anyways, I can't figure out how to write to this disk. I have amended the Thunar icon to read "gksudo Thunar" as its command. It opens Thunar with whatever elevated rights that would come along with the command. I still can't write to the disk. If I change the permissions for the disk under the properties tab to be "read&write" for the user group, It asks me about something to be done retroactively to files. No matter whether I choose yes or no here, it still does not change the disk to a writable disk.
No love and no ideas. Can you help me write to this disk ? I run as a user called "user" so maybe I should not have made Thunar open as "gksudo" ?
so here's my issue and what I think is causing it right now. I have a 1TB external usb hard drive that has worked perfectly, but recently I set it up a mount point for it in fstab so that I could create a SMB share on the drive so I could stream videos and pictures to my TV through my Wii using WiiMC. This now works perfectly, but now the hard drive has been set into read-only mode. When I use sudo to try to chmod the drive or the folders on it, it does nothing. When I right-click on the drive and check the permissions tab, it says the owner is root and all the options are greyed out.
I've read through several posts on similar topics to this, but none of them have been very helpful as they suggest using command line tools that I don't know how to use, so I'm hoping someone here can give me concise, step by step instructions of what to type in, or what settings to change in fstab to solve my little problem so I can start copying stuff back onto my drive. I'm running Ubuntu 10.10 and the filesystem on the external drive is FAT32. Here's some more info you might need:
I am setting up a Linux laptop for my parents, and want to also create some backup scripts to allow them to easily back up to an external hard drive. [And for them to be able to use it, it has to be super simple.]
For security purposes (should the external drive ever get lost or stolen), I want to encrypt the entire device using TrueCrypt. That means my scripts will have to use TrueCrypt to mount the backup volume using the device name. [Right?]
Now to the actual question(s): 1) Is there a way to ensure that an external hard drive will ALWAYS be assigned the same device name when plugged in? [That would be the simplest solution for me.]
2) Alternatively, is there a way (using bash scripting) to "find" the device name of a particular external hard drive, even if it might not be known in advance.
I bought a Western Digital 1TB external hard drive to use with a Gentoo build. It connected beautifully, mounted visibly but despite being mounted read/write any attempt to write to it produced the error "read-only file system". I chased a number of red herrings before I found that the drive comes with an NTFS filesystem and NTFS support in my kernel was set to read-only, which I think was a default setting. Simple fix was to install a different file system - as it was a new drive there was no old data to lose.
I am trying to install the reiserfs drivers to read/write to my external drive. But keep getting command not found. Although the system can get man pages for modprobe.
modprobe reiserfs bash: modprobe: command not found
I also need to know how to add myself to the sudoers file. I have already tried visudo but this has not worked.
I have a large external drive, which I connect to my laptop via a PCMCIA card - the machine is old and does not have USB 2.0 built in, so I use the PCMCIA card for that.
I am thinking of the following setup, and hope you can give me some tips on whether or not that would be a sound solution:
- designate a boot partition on the laptop's internal hard drive, which could store kernels
- make up a linux partition (or more than one) to use as root for any distribution on the external drive
- keep /home as separate partition on the external drive
My goal in mind is to be able to boot more than one Linux partition from the external drive. I can't make it through USB boot because the PCMCIA card is not recognized before a kernel module is loaded, and I can't use the internal USB 1.1 port for the external drive.
Do you think this is the way to go? Currently, I only have my /home partition mounted off the external drive.
kde 4.3.4 kernel 2.6.32.7-smp Have Seagate 500GB (fuseblk) external usb drive that gets listed in the "Devices recently plugged in, pop-up panel" but a Verbatim 1.5TB does not. I have to mount it manually as ntfs volume.
When I boot using the Mint distro on same PC both ext usb drives are automounted. Looking for pointers as to why the 1.5TB verbatim disk does not automount.
On one of my machines the DVD/DVDRW/CDROM drive appears as /dev/hdc and is not identified as an optical drive by HAL. It is owned by root: disk and thus no users get permission to read/write in the device (not even those in the cdrom group). This stops playing DVDs, ripping CDs, no notifications appear when a disk is inserted, etc. etc. When I set the permissions for all to read/write from the device then users can access but still no notifications are shown.
On all my other machines the optical drive is identified as /dev/sr0 and is owned by root:cdrom . All have Slack 13.1 . Previously with Slack 12.2 this machine still had the drive in /dev/hdc but the permissions were right (I think because I added it to /etc/fstab with options for users to access it). I believe the problem is down to HAL not setting this drive to the correct group, but how do I fix it? I hate HAL, it has a mind of its own, just like in the scifi movie
[openSUSE 11.1, kernel 2.6.27.45-0.1-Default, Gnome 2.26.3] I have a problem where I have an external USB drive which mounts at boot, with /home aboard it along with several data-only partitions, and if I try to add another USB drive *after* boot, the system changes the device IDs previously given to the original drive. The already running sdb now becomes sdc. If a user or processes are attached to /home when this occurs they are left in the twilight zone and stuff starts crashing. An added weirdness is the newly added drive isn't stealing the sdb ID, the added drive becomes sdd instead, and nothing at all is left at the sdb ID.
Note:
- System boots from sda, a non-USB drive with the system as well as /swap onboard, that should be uninvolved with the problem.
- Among the 4 partitions of the boot-mounted USB drive there are 2 lux-encrypted partitions (ext3). One is /home (originally encrypted under 10.3 and added back after machine upgraded to 11.1) and another being a data directory (later encrypted under 11.1).
- The problem _may_ occur only when the additional added drive is also lux-encrypted, but this may or may not be always true as I have limited other USB stuff to test with, most of it is also lux-encrypted.
Just installed 11.3 on my computer, however when I connect an external NTFS harddisk I receive an error message. When I open dolphin to connect to an internal NTFS partition I receive the message:
I accidentally deleted the linux mint 8 that was on there due to a small issue discussed on another thread(long story followed by a stupid mistake). after then i reinstalled linux using the .iso i found on the website. all is well. I boot up linux on the external and it runs great. then i turn off the laptop and try to plug it into another laptop( which i used the external hard drive on before and worked) and it went through the bios screen but then after slight lag(5 seconds longer then usual) the blinking cursor in the top left corner would not display anything, anything meaning "booting GRUB" or any other signs of activity. after waiting some time i quit and tried it back on the other laptop, which it was just working on, only to get the same result. I am confused about why it would work the first go around but nothing past that.
The only thing i altered on the external after i installed linux was that i put my home directory into it( from another version of linux mint)
As part of our back up strategy we back up data to two external strorage devices (NAS buffalo linkstation) via a cron job. Recently I noticed that the linkstation backups were not working and the server (via the terminal) complained about CIFS write error or something along these lines. I decided to reboot the server and this fixed the problem for one week for one of the linkstations and for a few weeks for the other linkstation.
There are no error messages this time on the server or on any of the logs that I have checked but the backups are not being made and the processes are still running for the days that backups have not been made.
the backups used to work everyday without fail until recently and no changes have been made to the script that does the backup..
managed to get things working so well on my laptop i thought i'd install ubuntu onto an external drive so i can boot to either xp or Ubuntu whenever i want, when i started up after the install it doesn't recognise the drive i loaded it to and appears to have lost the link to xp. the exact words are:
error: no such device: 4368f21f-d1b6-4c60-8c6b-4d2d38d16920. grub rescue>
what i can do to get my xp back, my wife uses the xp and will kill me if i don't sort it, fortunately the comps unrealiable anyway!
Since May 12,2009. Our system lifekeeper has the error log "lifekeeper error: DEVICE FAILURE on SCSI device '/dev/add'", but it ran normally. Until last week, it failover to the standby server. The disk still running, the error still come out.
I recently bought 320 GB Trancend external hard disk and working fine days back.Earlier i could copy from and to the hard disk with out any issue. I dont know what happened after that now i am not able to write any files in to the external hard disk. This is not NTFS formatted device. here is some of the out put from terminal.
Code: sundar@sundar-sundar:~$ fdisk -l Disk /dev/sda: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
i borrowed an external hard drive from my friend to back up a load of stuff on my windows partition before reinstalling it. I am doing this through ubuntu. I am trying to zip up folders like My Documents etc and chuck them on the external hard drive but it always comes up with errors to do with read/write permissions. In the permissions tab on the folder properties of the ext hard drive it says I am owner but i have no file access (only folder access is create and delete files). When i try to give myself read/write permission it just goes straight back to nothing when i look at it again.
I have a pc I want to clone and it has 2 partitions sda1 which is vfat and sda2 ntfs. When I had mounted my external hdd it was seen as sdc1 and my Knoppix boot as sdb1. I tried using the following command to copy the pc image to my external but when it gets to 26Gb it gives read error.
