Hard disk randomly goes Read-Only

easykillsoft · 06-25-2005, 01:57 PM

I have a hard disk that I use for backup-storage etc, pretty much using it all the time, and it just suddenly goes read-only and the only way I can see to get it to go read-write again is to reboot. I don't really like that, can someone help me figure out why this might be and how to stop it? oh and I can't unmount the drive it says its still busy when I try to do that.

Thanks for your help

rjlee · 06-25-2005, 02:15 PM

I can't tell you why it's remounting as read-only without more details, but you might find something out from /var/log/messages

You can always unmount a drive with

Code:

umount -l

which will schedule the drive to be unmounted when it's no longer busy.

Take a look in /proc/mounts and see if your drive has the “ro” (read-only) or “rw” (read-write) flag set.

Also, you can make a drive read-write without unmounting it using:

Code:

mount /dev/device -o remount,rw

For more information on the mount command, run

Code:

man mount

in a terminal.

Noth · 06-25-2005, 02:18 PM

Run dmesg, I bet your filesystem is detecting an error and remounting the fs to be safe. Get your manufacturer's drive diag (or install smartmontools) and see if the drive says it's dying.

easykillsoft · 06-25-2005, 03:24 PM

Thanks Noth, you were right, ran dmesg and it was showing a file system error, run e2fsck, did that and it seems to have fixed all the errors, thanks for the help.