Hi,

I just bought a Maxtor OneTouch 500G external hard drive. It is behaving strangely, and I'm thinking of returning it, but would like some advice first. The first thing I did was to remove the single ntfs partition and add a new 100G linux partition. This I formated with reiserfs. No problems so far, and I mounted it fine. After that, as root, I did a copy -r on a large directory structure. The copy proceeded just fine for a while (maybe 200M), and then it started spitting out messages that the filesystem was read-only and refused to copy any more files. Subsequent commands such as "mkdir" produced the same complaint (ie. read-only filesystem). I have verified that the permissions are set correctly, and there is tons of space left on the disk. If I unmount, I can no longer see the device at /dev/sdx unless I disconnect and reconnect the device, at which point it mounts and I can copy some more files before it starts in with the read-only nonsense.

Am I missing something obvious, or should I take it right back to the store without losing more time.

Thanks for any advice,
Brian

Anything interesting in your logs (messages, syslog) under /var/log/?

Also, you may want to be careful when copying in case there are symbolic links and such. You might want to use the archive switch (-a). man cp for more info

Nothing in the logs. I just used the cp as an example, I had the same problem with rsync.

EDIT: I take that back. In syslog there are a lot of these messages:

lost page write due to I/O error on sdc1
Buffer I/O error on device sdc1, logical block 51
end_request: I/O error, dev sdc, sector 9 76773160
ieee1394: Error parsing configrom for nod e 0-00:1023

Brian

Does the device support SMART ? If so, run a short or long test with 'smartctl'. That'll tell you if the drive itself has issues.

The problem seems to be related to the firewire. I plugged the device in via USB and it is working fine. I've never actually used firewire. Is it buggy in Linux?

Brian

I actually have the 200GB version of the same device you have and I, too, use the USB port (I don't have firewire).

I've never used firewire in Linux so I can't be of too much help there.

More than likely you will see the same problem if you plug in other firewire devices into your current setup, but you should test this if you can.

If you multiboot you should see if it is a problem in other OSs as well.

Thanks for your help. I'll probably not take it any further, as I don't really need firewire. (On the other hand, if anyone knows what the problem could be, I'd love to learn.)

Brian

I streamed video from a $ony camera using firewire, and it worked just fine. But, you're right it may be an issue just with firewire for this specific device (maybe the device itself doesn't handle firewire well).

You could try a newer version of the kernel, maybe if it's a driver issue it has been fixed ?