I mounted a usb Maxtor one touch on a dell running centos 5. I have no problem mounting the device and using it with Samba but then, for currently unknown reasons, the Maxtor drive becomes read-only. When this happens, I can unmount and then remount the drive and I am back to read-write. Sure enough though, it will fail again at some point and return to a read-only status.

The Maxtor drive is the 1.5 TB model. I used the windows software to create raid 1, then put it on my centos machine and formatted the drive to ext3.

[root@muttley ~]# cat /etc/fstab | grep maxtor
/dev/sda1 /maxtor auto noauto,users 0 0

When drive is fine:
[root@muttley ~]# cat /proc/mounts | grep maxtor
/dev/sda1 /maxtor ext3 rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,data=ordered 0 0

When drive has faulted to read-only:
[root@muttley ~]# cat /proc/mounts | grep maxtor
/dev/sda1 /maxtor ext3 ro,nosuid,nodev,noexec,data=ordered 0 0

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Dan

Check /var/log/messages; the drive probably has filesystem corruption. When the system encounters this, it attempts to protect the filesystem (minimize damage caused by additional writes) by remounting the filesystem read-only.

You will need to run fsck on the drive. Unmount it and run (as root):

e2fsck -C -p -f /dev/sda1

I was able to see an error in /var/log/messages. I ran the e2fsck and it found and repaired several areas identified as corrupted. Unfortunately, the problem kept coming back. I think it may have been the raid1 that was causing the repeated corruption. I have since move the drive to a windows pc and reformatted with NTFS and it has been working with no problem.

Thanks
Dan