Hi Geniuses!
I have a 2TB Seagate USB disk that is being used with backuppc to store daily backups. However, almost every day the backup is failing, and attempting to ls the drive gives "input/output error". Looking through DMESG shows multiple problems reading sectors on the disk, but I've yet to find a particular cause. If I reboot the machine, the drive immediately starts working again. If I fsck it, it reports no errors. The disk has two partitions on it, and the 2nd partition is used by SimpleBackup, and this seems to work fine. I'm currently backing up the backup before I do some more in-depth testing on it, and possibly reformat it. I forgot to mention that both partitions are encrypted. Do people think the disk is broken (bad sectors or hardware problems), or if not, any idea what's going on?
On to the next problem. I bought a different 2TB Seagate USB 3 disk which I was intending to use to replace the problematic disk. I managed to set up encrypted partitions on the new disk, and configure the computer so that they would automatically mount on boot.... so I tried to boot the machine and....
the BIOS screen appeared, then it said detecting devices... The old faulty drive is detected, but then the USB 3 Driver is not detected and the machine hangs. It's simple, with the drive connected at boot, the machine won't boot or detect the drive. Without the USB3 drive connected, the machine boots fine.
I'm guessing that the machine, which is quite old, can't cope with something about the new drive, perhaps it's slightly too big (although they're both ~2TB), or because it's USB3, and I think the old one is USB2. The old one has a power supply, but the new one doesn't, but I tried connecting it via a powered hub, and no difference.
Is there any way round the machine not booting? I don't think there's a updated bios for this old machine.
Any ideas, straws to clutch at?
Steve