Hi all,

I just recently switched from Karmic to Lynx and I really like it! The interface is slick and it seems that performance is generally better. Here's my issue:

After the first update, my external harddrive started mounting as 'read-only.' I'd read in the forums that other people were having similar issues, but I did a little more digging since no one was describing my exact problem.

Anyway, I have 10.04 running on a celeron based lenovo g450. I'm trying to connect a wd 500gb extern usb harddrive. The memory is formatted FAT32, so there shouldn't be an issue. The problem is that the drive mounts as 'read-only.' I initially thought that there was something to do with how it was auto-mounting the drive, because my ipod doesn't work, or doesn't map to the desktop, but I think that's unrelated.

Mountmanager tells me that there are bad sectors on the disk (clue!) and when running FSCK, or DOSFSCK -a -v, it refuses to automatically fix the issue, despite asking me whether or not to dump the corrupted files. Since a different USB stick works, I'm forced to conclude that the system doesn't like my drive, and I need to fix the drive before I can move forward. The catch 22 at the moment, is that I can't back up the drive at the moment, is there anyway to fix this?

I was thinking of

1) backing up to a friend's machine, copying the drive, and either reformatting or running window's chkdsk
2) just backing up and reformatting.
3) sacrificing something over the altar of old motherboards in the corner and hope some digital being takes pity...