dealing with a slightly flaky USB drive; unkillable bash process

[Petter Adsen]

On Tue, 22 Sep 2015 13:07:48 +0100
Adam Funk <a24061 at ducksburg.com> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I have a USB hard drive with a luks + ext4 partition on it.  The drive
> started acting flaky recently, so I bought a new one & am now trying
> to copy the files off the old one.  It connects fine, with the
> passphrase dialog, &c., but occasionally "drops off" a few minutes
> later.  When this happens, the /dev/mapper/luks-<uuid> device doesn't
> disappear, so I get an error message trying to remount the partition.
> Then 'sudo cryptsetup luksClose luks-<uuid>' gives a bunch of error
> messages about the device still being in use, & gives up.  
> 
> I've also noticed that I end up with a bash process (with no child
> processes) running around 99% of CPU in 'top'.  This process can't be
> killed, even with 'sudo kill -9 <pid>' --- I end up having to reboot
> the laptop, sometimes having to do a hard shutdown (i.e., with the
> power button).
> 
> I would appreciate any suggestions for getting the drive to work long
> enough to copy the data off, & for dealing with the seeminly
> unkillable bash.

It could be that there is a problem with the controller in the USB
enclosure, and the drive itself is fine - that has happened to me.

If that is the case, you could remove the drive from the enclosure and
plug it into a SATA port in another machine, as long as the drive is
indeed SATA and you have access to a machine with a free port.

Just a thought.

Petter

-- 
"I'm ionized"
"Are you sure?"
"I'm positive."
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