USB Drive mount failure (was Re: [vox-tech] Flash Drive mount failure)

[Jeff Newmiller]

The dmesg info below suggests that the hardware in question is a regular
hard disk, not a flash drive as the old subject indicated.

More comments below.

Ted Deppner wrote:
> I noticed with a Seagate "FreeAgent" 500G disk that it will internall
> power itself down even though it's still mounted in the linux filesystem.
> I have some other Seagates that handle this correctly, but the FreeAgent
> does not.
> 
> My theory is that the FreeAgent "forgets" about its USB connection, in
> addition to the drive spin down which is the cause of this problem...
> linux would be happy to wait for a spinup alone.  A forced umount and
> remount usually resolves this issue.
> 
> To better address this, I installed automount, which is designed to
> unmount a partition after a period of no use, effectively removing it from
> the filesystem before it actually would power itself down.  This isn't a
> perfect solution and effectively relegates the FreeAgent drive to only a
> "backup" drive since it cannot remain an active part of the filesystem
> indefinitely (unless it's constantly being touched).
> 
> If I had purchased this drive as an "online always" disk I would have
> returned it for another drive that handles this better.  As already
> mentioned, other drives in the Seagate family do handle this properly and
> work perfectly with linux.

This seems to be a problem on startup... not after extended use.

The fact that there are read errors on /dev/sda suggests to me that the
device appears to have failed.  This _could_ be due to bad USB cables or 
power supply, so try swapping them out.  It may also be a symptom only for
some sectors... if so, you can ignore errors and attempt to copy any
accessible bits off the drive using the "dd" command (google 'dd disk
recovery') and split them out... but if no valid bits come back from the
drive then you are hosed. (Note that if you can get good bits from the
rest of the drive, you will still have to split out the partitions into
separate pieces to get at the filesystem(s) on which to run fsck.)

> On Mon, Aug 13, 2007 at 05:22:37AM -0700, Soumyadeep nandi wrote:
>> Hi,
>>  
>>  While mounting one of the external hard disk we are getting the following error.
>>  
>>  Messages from dmesg:
>>  usb 1-5: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 5
>>  scsi4 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
>>  usb-storage: device found at 5
>>  usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
>>    Vendor: ST340083  Model: 2A                Rev:  0 0
>>    Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 00
>>  SCSI device sda: 781422768 512-byte hdwr sectors (400088 MB)
>>  sda: assuming drive cache: write through
>>  SCSI device sda: 781422768 512-byte hdwr sectors (400088 MB)
>>  sda: assuming drive cache: write through
>>   sda: sda1
>>  Attached scsi disk sda at scsi4, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
>>  usb-storage: device scan complete
>>  SCSI error : <4 0 0 0> return code = 0x8000002
>>  sda: Current: sense key: Medium Error
>>      Additional sense: Unrecovered read error
>>  end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 0
>>  Buffer I/O error on device sda, logical block 0
>>  SCSI error : <4 0 0 0> return code = 0x8000002
>>  sda: Current: sense key: Medium Error
>>      Additional sense: Unrecovered read error
>>  end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 8
>>  Buffer I/O error on device sda, logical block 1
>>  nfs_statfs: statfs error = 116
>>  SCSI error : <4 0 0 0> return code = 0x8000002
>>  sda: Current: sense key: Medium Error
>>      Additional sense: Unrecovered read error
>>  end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 16
>>  Buffer I/O error on device sda, logical block 2
>>  SCSI error : <4 0 0 0> return code = 0x8000002
>>  sda: Current: sense key: Medium Error
>>      Additional sense: Unrecovered read error
>>  end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 24
>>  Buffer I/O error on device sda, logical block 3
>>  SCSI error : <4 0 0 0> return code = 0x8000002
>>  sda: Current: sense key: Medium Error
>>      Additional sense: Unrecovered read error
>>  end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 32
>>  Buffer I/O error on device sda, logical block 4
>>  SCSI error : <4 0 0 0> return code = 0x8000002
>>  sda: Current: sense key: Medium Error
>>      Additional sense: Unrecovered read error
>>  end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 40
>>  Buffer I/O error on device sda, logical block 5
>>  nfs_statfs: statfs error = 116
>>  SCSI error : <4 0 0 0> return code = 0x8000002
>>  sda: Current: sense key: Medium Error
>>      Additional sense: Unrecovered read error
>>  end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 48
>>  Buffer I/O error on device sda, logical block 6
>>  SCSI error : <4 0 0 0> return code = 0x8000002
>>  sda: Current: sense key: Medium Error
>>      Additional sense: Unrecovered read error
>>  end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 56
>>  Buffer I/O error on device sda, logical block 7
>>  
>>  
>>  We have been working on this disk and suddenly crashed down and later we are not been able to mount it.
>>  
>>  Any suggestion how to recover the data would be greatly appriciated.
>>  
>>  Thanking you in advance.
>>  
>>  Regards
>>  Soumyadeep

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