Dear All,
I continue to have problems with a 1TB "Maxtor Basics" USB hard disk, after returning one disk of this kind and getting it exchanged on warranty this is now the second one that's developing problems so I wonder whether I'm doing something wrong.
The disk came with an NTFS partition which I scrapped and replaced with an ext3 partition using gparted. That seemed to work ok, although I recall that I wondered a bit about the noises it made already at that time. After putting a bunch of files (movies from a Topfield PVR) onto the disk, the file system developed problems that weren't fixable with fsck. I therefore partitioned and formatted the disk again. First I tried fsck -c option to check for bad blocks. After running a whole night, fsck had gone to (about) 1200000 out of 200000000 blocks, and the hard disk made a rhythmic, clicking noise. It had obviously slowed down during the night (it was at about 1000000 blocks when I checked before going to sleep), so I stopped that.
Now I've done things from scratch the traditional way with fdisk and mkfs (without -c). The disk made a lot of weird noises while mkfs was running, but eventually mkfs completed. I then mounted the file system and exercised it by repeatedly copying a Linux kernel source tree onto it. This worked ok for a few times, then I decided to have a look with du at the growing amount of stuff on the disk. Upon that, the copying process started to fail with messages like
cp: writing `/media/mnt/dummy0008/include/net/ieee80211.h': Read-only file system cp: cannot create regular file `/media/mnt/dummy0008/include/net/checksum.h': Read-only file system
and ``tail -f /var/log/messages'' at this time showed multiple repetitions of
Feb 15 14:01:31 paxarchia kernel: [ 8431.175590] Info fld=0x0 Feb 15 14:01:31 paxarchia kernel: [ 8431.175590] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Add. Sense: Internal target failure Feb 15 14:01:32 paxarchia kernel: [ 8431.280559] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE,SUGGEST_OK Feb 15 14:01:32 paxarchia kernel: [ 8431.280559] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Sense Key : Hardware Error [current]
The hard disk made a constant, whirring sound and its green LED was blinking at 1Hz (approx).
When I umounted the file system, the whirring continued for several minutes and the umount command hang. After several minutes, though, the hard disk made a few clicks and stopped whirring, and umount completed.
Can any of you make sense out of all this?
Best regards & thanks in advance, Jan