USB Drive problems
 

Hello all, I am having problems with a USB drive. Something got messed up on my other system and Windows 7 will not boot. I took that hard drive out. I am hooking it up to a Prudent Way USB 2.0 to IDE/SATA adapter. I want to get my files off of the drive and then I will decide if I take that system Linux only like I did this one, or try to recover Windows 7 and go dual boot maybe. Let's call this drive Ext-1, since I have a 2 TB external drive I also hook up - to copy files from Ext-1 to, if I can ever get this working. Let's call the 2 TB drive Ext-2

I am new to Linux, although I have been checking out Live Distro's and even set the other computer up to dual boot Mint and Win 7 a few times. I am seeing odd behavior when trying to hook this drive up, and the same thing happens when I put it in an external USB enclosure and try to work with it that way - and it's even slower in the enclosure.

Ext-1 mounts sometimes, partway. It will say it can't mount the drive, but I will see it listed in the Dolphin File Manager as a device. I can click on it and open it that way. Or later on, if I try a couple of times, it will finally allow me to open it with Dolphin.

I can access my files, and I was even able to delete hiber.sys from the drive - I heard that might have been causing my problems for why Win 7 wouldn't boot, so I decided to go ahead and delete it like some posts advised, for when I put it back in the other laptop and try to boot Win 7.

But, I can't seem to get it to copy any files from Ext-1 drive to a directory on this system, or to Ext-2 that I hook up to this laptop. I can browse the files, but copying and such doesn't seem to work.

Every few minutes, no set time, Ext-1 dismounts itself or something. So I have to start all over again with this process. Maybe it is powering down? I don't know. But another odd behavior, after a while if I leave Ext-1 plugged into the USB port, either Mint 'finds' it again and mounts it and I go through the process all over again, or maybe it wakes itself up or whatever and I have to go through the whole mount process all over again.

So, does anyone have any ideas for the best way to mount Ext-1 in a way so that it will - 1. Stay alive and accessible, and 2. I will have access to it in a way that allows me to copy files off of it onto this laptop or to Ext-2?

By the way, / > var > log > kern.log is showing some USB errors and such, some of which seem to maybe be related to this problem, but I don't know anywhere near enough about Linux to even guess at what they mean. If it will help someone with troubleshooting, I can post a link to it in a new reply, if someone can tell me a good place on the Net to post it so that it is accessible - since it appears I do not have permission to post attachments at this time.

Thanks for any help you can give me.

Well it would seem that even though Dolphin told me hiberfil.sys was deleted, it wasn't. It shows up on an ls of the directory in the terminal. It had a message about it, "ls: cannot access hiberfil.sys: Input/output error" and it gives me the same message when I try to shred it. Is this drive being mounted as read only possibly?

Maybe a physical problem with the drive could be why its powering down. I wonder if "ext-1" has root access only when mounting the way you are. This could be why you cant copy files from it. If this is the case, you can either change the permissions or just move files over as root, and worry about permissions later for the specific folders/files.

Thanks for the response erik2282. It might be mounting it as root. But it doesn't let me copy even as root. I opened a terminal in the directory the drive mounts to. I tried to cp the files, and even as root it gave me the message "cp: omitting directory ‘Backups’"

Edit
It did let me copy a file though. Why will it let me copy a file but not a directory?