[SOLVED] External USB Hard Drive became read only

nutjob16 · 08-21-2010, 11:24 AM

I was in the process of backing up data from my hard drive to an external usb drive when the drive suddenly became read only. Does anyone know how I can make it read/write again? I am using Debian Lenny and the drive is ntfs formatted. I have another ntfs formatted usb drive that is not effected in this way.

troop · 08-21-2010, 11:32 AM

try

Code:

mount -o remount,rw mount_point

Quote:

the drive suddenly became read only

you can look at dmesg for the reason.

nutjob16 · 08-21-2010, 11:51 AM

Thanks troop,

I tried the command and it didn't work.

I looked in dmesg and nothing really popped out at me as being the answer. I saw a line such as:
[ 43.846581] sd 1:0:0:0: [sdd] Write Protect is off

Which would indicate to me that it is in read/write mode, however it is still read only.

Could the hard drive be going?

yancek · 08-21-2010, 01:36 PM

Quote:

I was in the process of backing up data from my hard drive to an external usb drive

How were you doing this backup? From a bash or other script? using dd command?

Quote:

the drive suddenly became read only

What does that mean? How did you notice it became "suddenly" readonly?

nutjob16 · 08-21-2010, 04:31 PM

yancek,

I was just dragging and dropping files one by one with the file manager. I copied one and it worked, then I tried to copy the next one and it gave me a message, "operation not supported".

However, it appears that it is not read only. I am able to delete. Interestingly, I deleted 2 files, then I was able to copy 2 files to the drive before it gave me the "operation not supported" message.

Is there a limit to the number of files I can put on the drive?

SharpyWarpy · 08-21-2010, 05:51 PM

No there shouldn't be a limit on how many files unless, of course, you're out of disc space. If you were moving the files and not copying I could see the potential problem of the file being moved protected and incapable of being deleted. But you're copying so it's a mystery. You say the other external drive is set up the same way and it's not affected. I wonder if the enclosure circuitry is going bad? I've seen that happen. Just for kicks and giggles try changing enclosures and see what happens. Good Luck.

nutjob16 · 08-22-2010, 09:18 AM

Hello,

I believe I figured this out. Looks like the ntfs-3g drivers in Lenny are the problem. I tried the latest (10.04) ubuntu live cd and was able to add more files to the drive.

SharpyWarpy · 08-22-2010, 11:48 AM

Glad you got it sorted out. Now all you need is to update your ntfs-3g package.