Internal harddrive read-only(hitachi SATA 650Gb)

[gerard4143]

Hi,

I have an odd problem...well an annoying problem. My internal hard drive is read only which is O.K. unless you need to write to it or say boot it.

So what happened? I really don't know, I sent my computer to get some maintenance done on it because it won't boot, won't power up, it won't even go so far as post any POST errors. It was dead...Wait a minute, I think the power supply fan worked anyways the Acer maintenance people said I had a bad RAM module and they replaced it and said the computer is now fine. Well its fine except now the internal hard drive is read only? I tried accessing the drive via PartedMagic but couldn't delete/format or write to the hard drive(I could read the hard drive with PartedMagic). What can cause a hard drive to be read only?

[rcgreen]

How could they have said the computer is fine if it won't boot?

[atreyu]

Is there a read-only setting in the BIOS?

Can you boot up with a Live Linux CD and run hdparm and smartclt on it? SystemRescueCd is a good one.

[gerard4143]

Is there a read-only setting in the BIOS?

Can you boot up with a Live Linux CD and run hdparm and smartclt on it? SystemRescueCd is a good one.

I tried accessing the drive with PartedMagic, I could mount it and read data from it(I actually opened a text file with an editor but couldn't modify the data)...

Now here's why I don't think its the BIOS, I tried removing the 650G drive and replacing it with another drive and everything works fine.

I'm really lost here, I have no idea what's wrong with this drive.

Here's the Hitachi model and part number.

Model - HDT721064SLA360
Part No - 0A37991


Also: I did try running smartclt on the drive via PartedMagic.

[atreyu]

The reason why I mentioned running those progs (hdparm, smartctl) is that they would hopefully tell you if something was physically wrong with the drive, which would cause the kernel to put it into read-only mode. Does dmesg or /var/log/messages contain any additional info?

[gerard4143]

The reason why I mentioned running those progs (hdparm, smartctl) is that they would hopefully tell you if something was physically wrong with the drive, which would cause the kernel to put it into read-only mode. Does dmesg or /var/log/messages contain any additional info?

I'll have to check that out. Thanks for the help.

[atreyu]

Also: I did try running smartclt on the drive via PartedMagic.

Try running:

smartctl -H --all /dev/sda

and posting the output here. also be sure to check dmesg after running that.

[gerard4143]

This is the output of smartctl

root@PartedMagic:~# smartctl -H --all /dev/sda
smartctl version 5.38 [i486-slackware-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-8 Bruce Allen
Home page is smartmontools

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Device Model: Hitachi HDT721064SLA360
Serial Number: STHDD7MG1WV46Y
Firmware Version: STDOA31B
User Capacity: 640,135,028,736 bytes
Device is: Not in smartctl database [for details use: -P showall]
ATA Version is: 8
ATA Standard is: ATA-8-ACS revision 4
Local Time is: Tue Nov 1 17:17:38 2011 UTC
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Disabled

SMART Disabled. Use option -s with argument 'on' to enable it.
root@PartedMagic:~#


Here's an excerpt from the var/log/messages

Nov 1 17:11:00 (none) user.info kernel: sd 5:0:0:0: [sda] ASC=0x0 ASCQ=0x0
Nov 1 17:11:00 (none) user.err kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 12851279
Nov 1 17:11:00 (none) user.err kernel: Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 1606402
Nov 1 17:11:00 (none) user.warn kernel: lost page write due to I/O error on sda1
Nov 1 17:11:00 (none) user.err kernel: JBD2: I/O error detected when updating journal superblock for sda1:8.
Nov 1 17:11:00 (none) user.info kernel: ata4: EH complete
Nov 1 17:11:00 (none) user.info kernel: kjournald2 starting: pid 2473, dev sda1:8, commit interval 5 seconds
Nov 1 17:11:00 (none) user.info kernel: EXT4-fs: delayed allocation enabled
Nov 1 17:11:00 (none) user.info kernel: EXT4-fs: file extents enabled
Nov 1 17:11:00 (none) user.info kernel: EXT4-fs: mballoc enabled
Nov 1 17:11:00 (none) user.info kernel: EXT4-fs: mounted filesystem sda1 with ordered data mode
Nov 1 17:11:00 (none) user.info kernel: EXT4-fs: mballoc: 0 blocks 0 reqs (0 success)
Nov 1 17:11:00 (none) user.info kernel: EXT4-fs: mballoc: 0 extents scanned, 0 goal hits, 0 2^N hits, 0 breaks, 0 lost
Nov 1 17:11:00 (none) user.info kernel: EXT4-fs: mballoc: 0 generated and it took 0
Nov 1 17:11:00 (none) user.info kernel: EXT4-fs: mballoc: 0 preallocated, 0 discarded
Nov 1 17:11:00 (none) user.info kernel: EXT4-fs: INFO: recovery required on readonly filesystem.
Nov 1 17:11:00 (none) user.info kernel: EXT4-fs: write access will be enabled during recovery.
Nov 1 17:11:01 (none) user.info kernel: EXT4-fs: barriers enabled
Nov 1 17:11:01 (none) user.info kernel: kjournald2 starting: pid 2484, dev sda6:8, commit interval 5 seconds
Nov 1 17:11:01 (none) user.info kernel: EXT4-fs: delayed allocation enabled
Nov 1 17:11:01 (none) user.info kernel: EXT4-fs: file extents enabled
Nov 1 17:11:01 (none) user.info kernel: EXT4-fs: mballoc enabled
Nov 1 17:11:01 (none) user.info kernel: EXT4-fs: recovery complete.
Nov 1 17:11:01 (none) user.err kernel: ata4.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x0
Nov 1 17:11:01 (none) user.err kernel: ata4.00: irq_stat 0x40000001
Nov 1 17:11:01 (none) user.err kernel: ata4.00: cmd ca/00:08:1c:24:fd/00:00:00:00:00/e1 tag 0 dma 4096 out
Nov 1 17:11:01 (none) user.err kernel: res 51/04:00:23:24:fd/b7:00:01:00:00/e1 Emask 0x1 (device error)
Nov 1 17:11:01 (none) user.err kernel: ata4.00: status: { DRDY ERR }

[atreyu]

Based upon the stuff in dmesg/messages, it looks to me like the hard drive is dying. I am surprised that the tech support people did not catch this!

You may need to try and scavenge what data you can and get a new drive. Check out TestDisk and ddrescue (part of the SytemRescueCD) come to mind.

[gerard4143]

Based upon the stuff in dmesg/messages, it looks to me like the hard drive is dying. I am surprised that the tech support people did not catch this!

You may need to try and scavenge what data you can and get a new drive. Check out TestDisk and ddrescue (part of the SytemRescueCD) come to mind.

No worries there, I have a backup all the important data. I'll try ddrescue and TestDisk later tonight.

Again thanks for your time..Gerard4143