USB-Disk of 1000 GB suddenly fell into Read Only mode

[kampmann]

Hi group, what I have to report today seems a bit strange:

A while ago I bought a Verbatim USB-Disk of one terabyte (model 53016 1TB - originally with a FAT-filesystem) ... In order to make it linux compatible I thought I did a "mkfs" on it creating an "ext2" filesystem.

Then everything was fine until an amount of approximately 17 GB of stored data was reached. Then suddenly I could only access the disk in Read - only mode ... which did not help any more for backup-purposes. Moreover some files were destroyed ... (not all, but about 5 %). I managed to make a backup onto another disk of the remaining data ...

Anybody knows about that problem

Thanks Jörg

[Roxoff]

Sounds like a faulty drive. Or perhaps its been subjected to an impact of some kind?

If it's under warranty (and the data isn't that sensitive) maybe you can get the manufacturer to replace it?

[kampmann]

Sounds like a faulty drive. Or perhaps its been subjected to an impact of some kind?

Thanks ...

I am not sure but it could be - I used it in a camper (r.v.) - strange is that I can write once (e.g. a simple) textfile of zero length into a newly created directory. After this it turns R/O

[Rubberman]

Plug it in, but either don't mount it, or unmount it if automounted. Then, run the command: fsck -c -f
That will scan for bad blocks and fix the file system. If that fails because of I/O errors, then you know the drive is fubar. If it reports a lot of bad sectors, then the drive is fubar. If the drive has SMART technology (most current drives do), then your linux system may be able to get a report of how many sectors are bad, how many read errors it is getting, how hot it has been running, etc.

[kampmann]

thanks, Iĺl do it and report the results here ...

[hans51]

some USB drives/sticks have a MECHANICAL switch to protect from writing = make it read only. check for that as well.
and if ever you have to reformat,
may be you consider ext4 ?? instead of ext2