[TriLUG] USB Mass Storage - changes from R/W to RO

[Paul G. Szabady]

Greetings,

I have the same problem on two machines and was hoping someone could shed
some light.  I have a CentOS 4.5 machine with a 500GB external USB drive
and a Suse 10 SP1 machine with a 250GB external USB drive.  In both cases,
I am able to mount the USB drives READ/WRITE but after some random amount
of time, the mount switches to READONLY, even if it's active.  For
example, I was copying ~13GB of data from a system drive to the USB drive
on the Suse/250GB system last night.  After about 2.7GB of data transfer,
it went belly up.  I have poked around on google, but most of what I find
pertains to getting the drive up and running, not where it "disappears". 
Has anyone run into this before?

Here's the relevant snippet from my dmesg log, after the USB drive was
power-cycled and the entry in my fstab.

<dmesg snippet>

usb 1-2: new full speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 8
usb 1-2: new device found, idVendor=0bc2, idProduct=3000
usb 1-2: new device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
usb 1-2: Product: FreeAgentDesktop
usb 1-2: Manufacturer: Seagate
usb 1-2: SerialNumber:             6RY08BNP
usb 1-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
scsi5 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
usb-storage: device found at 8
usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
  Vendor: Seagate   Model: FreeAgentDesktop  Rev: 100D
  Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 04
SCSI device sdb: 488397168 512-byte hdwr sectors (250059 MB)
sdb: Write Protect is off
sdb: Mode Sense: 1c 00 00 00
sdb: assuming drive cache: write through
SCSI device sdb: 488397168 512-byte hdwr sectors (250059 MB)
sdb: Write Protect is off
sdb: Mode Sense: 1c 00 00 00
sdb: assuming drive cache: write through
 sdb: sdb1
sd 5:0:0:0: Attached scsi disk sdb
sd 5:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 0
usb-storage: device scan complete
(fs/jbd/recovery.c, 255): journal_recover: JBD: recovery, exit status 0,
recovered transactions 2 to 5
(fs/jbd/recovery.c, 257): journal_recover: JBD: Replayed 14 and revoked
1/1 blocks
kjournald starting.  Commit interval 5 seconds
EXT3 FS on sdb1, internal journal
EXT3-fs: recovery complete.
EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.
kjournald starting.  Commit interval 5 seconds
EXT3 FS on sdb1, internal journal
EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.
sd 5:0:0:0: Device not ready: <6>: Current: sense key: Not Ready
    Additional sense: Logical unit not ready, initializing command required
end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 786631
EXT3-fs error (device sdb1): read_inode_bitmap: Cannot read inode bitmap -
block_group = 3, inode_bitmap = 98321
Aborting journal on device sdb1.
sd 5:0:0:0: Device not ready: <6>: Current: sense key: Not Ready
    Additional sense: Logical unit not ready, initializing command required
end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 4343
Buffer I/O error on device sdb1, logical block 535
lost page write due to I/O error on sdb1
sd 5:0:0:0: Device not ready: <6>: Current: sense key: Not Ready
    Additional sense: Logical unit not ready, initializing command required
end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 63
Buffer I/O error on device sdb1, logical block 0
lost page write due to I/O error on sdb1
EXT3-fs error (device sdb1) in ext3_new_inode: IO failure
journal commit I/O error
EXT3-fs error (device sdb1) in ext3_create: IO failure
ext3_abort called.
EXT3-fs error (device sdb1): ext3_journal_start_sb: Detected aborted journal
Remounting filesystem read-only

</dmesg snippet>

<fstab>

#/dev/sdb1      /mnt/usbdrive   ext3    defaults        1 1
/dev/sdb1       /mnt/usbdrive   ext3    acl,user_xattr,sync     1 1

</fstab>

I had hoped that maybe using autofs would help in some way, but even that
didn't seem to make a difference either.

Thoughts?

-- 
Paul
@ Thy Service