[ubuntu-uk] External drive is stuck at read-only.

[Andrew Jenkins]

Joshua Scotton wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-01-29 at 02:01 +0000, Tom Bamford wrote:
>   
>> Andrew Jenkins wrote: 
>>     
>>> Daniel Davies wrote:
>>>   
>>>       
>>>> Andrew Jenkins wrote:
>>>>   
>>>>     
>>>>         
>>>>> <div class="moz-text-flowed" style="font-family: -moz-fixed">I've 
>>>>> recently been playing with a NAS drive. To set
>>>>> it up I had it connected as an external USB drive.
>>>>> All was going well, fdisk, mkfs, etc. and I moved a
>>>>> couple of Gb of files to it.
>>>>>
>>>>> After I disconnected it and plugged it back into my
>>>>> machine it suddenly decided to be a read-only file
>>>>> system.  I remember a pen-drive of mine doing the
>>>>> same thing and I ended up having to redo the mkfs to
>>>>> cure it.  This isn't a problem with a 512Mb pen
>>>>> drive but with a 500Gb drive with over 100Gb of files
>>>>> already on there it's not really an option.
>>>>>
>>>>> Any other answers?  I'm using Ubuntu 7.10 (Gnome).
>>>>>
>>>>> Andy Jenkins.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> </div>
>>>>>     
>>>>>       
>>>>>           
>>>> This could be to do with unmounting. Did you unmount the drives properly 
>>>> before disconnecting them?
>>>> Right click; Unmount device or Eject.
>>>> Daniel Davies
>>>>
>>>>   
>>>>     
>>>>         
>>> I'm pretty certain I did but then we all make mistakes.  If that's what 
>>> caused it how
>>> do I put it right (without a reformat that is)?
>>>
>>> Andy.
>>>
>>>   
>>>       
>> What type of filesystem is on the disk? Running an fsck on the
>> filesystem may cure the problem (an ext3 or reiser filesystem may have
>> a corrupt/unclean journal which can be fixed at the possible cost of
>> the last few files written to it). Moreso with larger drives, I've
>> found that unmounting takes a long time when there are lots of
>> unwritten data pending, if you don't allow it to complete the effects
>> can be devastating.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Tom
>>
>>     
> Hear, hear...
> I find that when my usb drives go read-only, it's either nautilus
> playing up or a small corruption on the drive.
> In the first case I do `killall nautilus`, in the second I unmount the
> drive and then do `fsck /dev/sdb1 -a` where sdb1 points to the read-only
> partition
>
> Regards,
>
> Josh
>
>   
Cheers Guys,

Fsck cured it, and you're probably right about the unmount thing.  I had
moved a lot of data and probably pulled the plug before everything had
chance to 'finalise',  I did the same thing with my IPod once.  I've
set it up as Vfat by the way (for those who asked).  My wife uses Vista
on her laptop and there's little point having a network drive that can
only be used by half the network!

Now all I need to do is get this thing working as network drive, it's
proving problematic at the moment, but that's one for the future.

Andy Jenkins.