external harddrive errors
 

whenever I try to create a new folder in my external harddrive, it says "Error "Unsupported operation" creating new folder."

whats the problem? after canceling copying a large amount of files from my master to my external, all the sudden I get this error, what do I do?

I suggest that you check out the partition in question using fsck. umount the partition, run fsck against the partition to correct any errors, and then mount the partition.

Did you try to move the files with the dd command? If you canceled a dd command in the middle then the partition may be so badly damaged that fsck cannot fix it.

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Steve Stites

well, now im not worried about copying the files per se, I just want to be able to access them.

first it wasnt mountable, now it is. after that, I tried to access a particularly large folder with over 30 gb of data, and said it had an input/output error, now thats gone. NOW it says 'The folder contents could not be displayed'.

Doesnt fsck run the risk of losing data?

Note that fsck is only suitable for linux partitions formatted as ext2 or ext3
Yes, but fsck is clever, and does its best to preserve data. If it finds data it doesn't know what to do with it puts it into lost+found, where you can often recover it.
If the disk is DOS formatted, maybe you should try some DOS-format recovery programs: eg fatback runs on linux.

Hi,
Sorry but you statement about 'fsck' supports only ext2/3 is not correct;

SystemRescueCd has several good disk utilities.

This link and others are available from 'Slackware-Links' .

You are correct:
locate fsck | grep bin returns:
So I suppose you just need to choose the appropriate one.
I have always just used fsck (for my ext3 partitions), maybe I should have used /sbin/fsck.ext3 ? It worked anyway.

Thanks, I learn something new every day :)