External USB Hard Drive became read only
 

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.

try
you can look at dmesg for the reason.

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?

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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