Arch Linux

aaaantoine

Member

Registered: 2008-12-12

Posts: 44

USB HDD Mounts Fine, then becomes Read-only and non-unmountable.

Oy. I have exhausted myself with a number of issues today (my computer wants to give me a heart attack or something).

Here's the problem:

I have a backup method that I carried over with me from when I was using Ubuntu.  In the interest of disclosure, it goes as follows:

1. Plug in external hard drive.  It auto-mounts (by magic, as far as I'm concerned... okay it's probably HAL) to "/media/WD 80GB".  Since the drive itself is a carryover from when I was using Windows, its filesystem is FAT32.  It mounts as vfat.
2. Open the terminal and type:

cd /media/WD\ 80GB/backup/rsync
./synchronize

The bash script "synchronize" consists of ...

#!/bin/sh

#note: replace aspire-5050 with the appropriate computer name
sudo rsync -av --delete --ignore-errors /home/ /media/WD\ 80GB/backup/rsync/aspire-5050/home/ --modify-window=1 --exclude-from=/home/anthony/rsync-exclude 2> /media/WD\ 80GB/backup/rsync/errors-last-run
sed -i -e '/chgrp/d' -e '/chown/d' /media/WD\ 80GB/backup/rsync/errors-last-run

About a quarter of the way through rsync, the drive suddenly becomes read-only.  Which is incredibly strange to me, because it starts out read/write.

Then, by no means can I unmount it.  If I try to unmount via the KDE's Device Notifier plasmoid, it crashes plasma.  If I try to unmount via command line, I get...

anthony@aspire-5050:~$ sudo umount /dev/sdb1
umount: /media/WD 80GB: device is busy.
        (In some cases useful info about processes that use
         the device is found by lsof(8) or fuser(1))
anthony@aspire-5050:~$ fuser /dev/sdb1
anthony@aspire-5050:~$

It unmounts when I restart, but other than that, no luck.

As for changing permissions, or anything about the system...

anthony@aspire-5050:~$ sudo chmod +w /media/WD\ 80GB/
chmod: changing permissions of `/media/WD 80GB/': Read-only file system

I don't think it's space related as KDE reports that the drive still has 18.5GB free.

I'm pretty sure I've backed up successfully before in Arch, but it's possible I just wasn't paying close enough attention to the logs.

Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

aaaantoine

Member

Registered: 2008-12-12

Posts: 44

Re: USB HDD Mounts Fine, then becomes Read-only and non-unmountable.

Okay, I think I figured out at least part of the problem.

Since I'm redirecting the error output to the same device that I'm backing up to, the device must not be able to keep up with itself (especially since it has roughly one error per file -- since I'm backing up from ext3 to vfat it spews an error for each file because it fails to chgrp or chown).

I altered the bash file to redirect the error log to my home folder, and then move that log to the backup drive as a separate operation.  The backup seems to be working better now.  I will edit this post if I see any evidence to the contrary.

Also if anyone has some insight as to why I can't both rsync to and redirect the log to the same external HDD, I'd like to know for future reference.