[CentOS] USB drive fails at sector 0xFFFFFFF

Kenneth Porter shiva at sewingwitch.com
Mon Sep 8 18:36:35 UTC 2008


--On Monday, September 08, 2008 7:30 AM -0700 NiftyClusters Mitch 
<niftycluster at niftyegg.com> wrote:

> You are backing up to NTFS on Linux?
>
> The NTFS  file system specification is a trade secret last I checked..
>
> Anytime I see an error where the number is binary all ones I
> suspect a magic number... and worry.
>
> How was the disk partitioned?
> How was this partition formatted?
> Was the filesystem converted from old to new ntfs format?
>
>    http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc781134.aspx

It's actually 3 drives that I rotate, and I've confirmed seeing this on two 
of them, and those two are different brands and sizes. The all-ones sector 
number indeed worried me. But the problem is reported below the filesystem 
level, from a raw sector read, so I'm inclined not to blame the filesystem 
here. Note how the log messages look like they're coming from the SCSI 
emulation layer.

BTW, the filesystem is actually the ntfs-3g FUSE-based system, which I've 
installed from the RPMForge repository.

Just for grins, I may go ahead and reformat to ext3 and try again, but the 
only thing I see that changing is the access pattern, which might hide the 
underlying problem.





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