SOLVED! Re: USB drive re-mounting itself as READ ONLY by itself...

[Gregory Gulik]

I hate when this happens.  I got bit by the old Kernel keeping the 
partition information cached when swapping USB devices.  I just 
remembered I swapped drives shortly after rebooting and I forgot to do 
the "eject /dev/sda" command after removing the first drive and before 
inserting the new drive.

The problem was that I went from a 250G drive to a 160G drive but the 
kernel still had the partition information for the 250G drive when you 
did an "fdisk -l /dev/sda" which was causing the instability!!!!

I unmounted, ejected the file system, fsck'd the ext3 partition just to 
be sure and re-mounted it and I suspect it will work just fine from now on.


Gregory Gulik wrote:
> 
> I've been using an external USB 2.0 drive as a backup device on my 
> Fedora box for a while and it's been working fine.  Recently however 
> I've been trying the Interactive kernel 2.6.6-1.435.2.3.desktop.1 and I 
> appreciate the improved interactive response but one oddity is about 
> every other day my /backup device (the USB drive) seems to be 
> re-mounting itself as read only.  Attempts to use the remount option 
> don't work resulting in the error:
> 
> mount: block device /dev/sda2 is write-protected, mounting read-only
> 
> If I manually unmount the drive and mount it again it's fine again for 
> another day or two.  Unfortunately my automated backups every other day 
> fail because they can't write to the drive.
> 
> I then have to fix the mount and re-run the backup manually.
> 
> One thing that might have something to do with it are these errors in 
> syslog:
> 
> Jul 21 02:01:41 penguin kernel: ext3_reserve_inode_write: aborting 
> transaction: Journal has aborted in 
> __ext3_journal_get_write_access<2>EXT3-fs error (device sda2) in 
> ext3_reserve_inode_write: Journal has aborted
> Jul 21 02:01:41 penguin kernel: EXT3-fs error (device sda2) in 
> ext3_orphan_del: Journal has aborted
> Jul 21 02:01:41 penguin kernel: ext3_reserve_inode_write: aborting 
> transaction: Journal has aborted in 
> __ext3_journal_get_write_access<2>EXT3-fs error (device sda2) in 
> ext3_reserve_inode_write: Journal has aborted
> Jul 21 02:01:41 penguin kernel: EXT3-fs error (device sda2) in 
> ext3_delete_inode: Journal has aborted
> Jul 21 02:01:42 penguin kernel: EXT3-fs abort (device sda2): 
> ext3_journal_start: Detected aborted journal
> Jul 21 14:18:52 penguin kernel: EXT3-fs abort (device sda2): 
> ext3_remount: Abort forced by user
> Jul 21 14:18:59 penguin kernel: EXT3-fs abort (device sda2): 
> ext3_remount: Abort forced by user
> 

-- 
Greg Gulik                                 http://www.gulik.org/greg/
greg @ gulik.org