Updatedb is crashing my usb2 external drive
 

Hi

Can anyone help?

I have found out that updatedb (which runs as a cron job) is crashing my USB2 harddrive. This does not occur with USB1.

The output from dmesg is:
hub.c: USB device not accepting new address (error=-71)
Dec 6 11:16:53 everton kernel: scsi: device set offline - not ready or command retry failed after bus reset: host 0 channel 0 id 0 lun 0
Dec 6 11:16:53 everton kernel: SCSI disk error : host 0 channel 0 id 0 lun 0 return code = 70000
Dec 6 11:16:53 everton kernel: I/O error: dev 08:01, sector 147592648
Dec 6 11:16:53 everton kernel: I/O error: dev 08:01, sector 405798944
Dec 6 11:16:53 everton kernel: I/O error: dev 08:01, sector 416284720
Dec 6 11:16:53 everton kernel: I/O error: dev 08:01, sector 421003304
Dec 6 11:16:53 everton kernel: I/O error: dev 08:01, sector 427819056
Dec 6 11:16:53 everton kernel: I/O error: dev 08:01, sector 428605472
Dec 6 11:16:53 everton kernel: I/O error: dev 08:01, sector 430964768
Dec 6 11:16:53 everton kernel: I/O error: dev 08:01, sector 433061904
Dec 6 11:16:53 everton kernel: I/O error: dev 08:01, sector 433586208
Dec 6 11:16:53 everton kernel: I/O error: dev 08:01, sector 435421208
Dec 6 11:16:53 everton kernel: I/O error: dev 08:01, sector 439877680


etc etc

I can just disable the upodatedb but I do noy realy want to do this, so any help would be appreciated

Ian

As a userspace program, updatedb shouldn't have the permissions to meddle with hardware. Thus it's not updatedb's fault really. There must be another reason.

Run a filesystem check on your USB2 drive, there may be some corruption which does only occur during updatedb because it goes over the whole disk. In worst case, your drive may be defective.

Another very likely possibility is that linux support for USB2 drives is unstable in general and likely to cause problems especially in heavy I/O load situations (as created by updatedb or simultaneuous copy tasks etc.).