USB drives going read-only

Bill Davidsen davidsen at tmr.com
Mon Nov 12 23:09:35 UTC 2007


Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
> Bill Davidsen wrote:
>> I have some USB drives I use for backup and sneakernet, and I've noted
>> that if unused they become read-only after being unused for a while. I
>> have seen this on FC[678] and it's annoying rather than critical,
>> because of the way I use the drives.
>>
>> mount still shows as rw, unmount and mount clears.
>>
>> Ring any bells? I don't have enough details to file a good bug yet, if
>> this is known I won't bother.
>>
> How are the drives formatted? If they are formatted ext2 or ext3,
> they may have gone too long between file system checks, and you need
> to run e2fsck on them. (The time is configurable using tune2fs - you
> can even turn it off.) There is also a counter for the number of
> times you can mount it before a check is required, but because you
> said unused for while, I suspect date rather then mount count.

They are ext3, and the counters you mention only cause an fsck to be run 
at boot time, not for the drives to go read only. It happens on multiple 
systems and doesn't happen if the drives are in use a lot.

I suspected that power save was trying to spin down the drive and it 
came back up r/o, but as I say, I haven't done a lot of testing, I was 
hoping someone else had seen the problem.

Usually happens after 12 hrs idle or less, sometimes on a few hours idle.
> 
> If they are FAT formatted drives, what happens if you run a check on
> the drives? You can run the check under Windows or Linux, but it
> would be interesting to see what Windows reports.
> 
Haven't tried using any thumb drives with FC8 yet. All my real drives 
are ext[23].

-- 
Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>
   "We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked."  - from Slashdot




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