[CentOS] Re: USB drive fails at sector 0xFFFFFFF

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More than likely it is a problem with the Linux reverse engineered support for a Windows proprietary file system. Why back up to NTFS?

Originally I was backing up across the LAN to the drive attached to my XP workstation.

That would isolate the error if it was caused by the NTFS driver. I would use a linux supported filesystem unless you *need* to be able to look at these dump files from a windows workstation. Also see if the Manu. has a test program to verify the drives. Sometimes a few of the PATA to USB interfaces do some strange things to I/O streams. I have a drive that would consistently lock my old XP workstations USB interfaces, but works fine on the new one.