Hi - relatively inexperienced user here. I installed CentOS 5.2 yesterday (http install via a mirror, worked brilliantly), as well as a new Seagate 1Tb USB external HDD (from the new Xtreme line), for backup/media storage. Using fdisk I put two primary partitions on the Seagate, /dev/sde1 and /dev/sde2 (roughly half the drive each). Then I used mkfs.ext3 on both to create ext3 filesystems on those partitions. My fstab entries look like so: /dev/sde1 /mnt/seagate1 ext3 rw,user,noexec 0 0 /dev/sde2 /mnt/seagate2 ext3 rw,user,noexec 0 0 I copied some data onto /dev/sde1 and went to bed. This morning, I found a clump of kernel messages on the console (lightly edited from /var/log/messages): kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev sde, sector 492896319 kernel: Buffer I/O error on device sde1, logical block 61612032 kernel: EXT3-fs error (device sde1): ext3_readdir: directory #30801921 contains a hole at offset 0 kernel: Aborting journal on device sde1. kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev sde, sector 12655 kernel: Buffer I/O error on device sde1, logical block 1574 kernel: lost page write due to I/O error on sde1 kernel: sd 3:0:0:0: Device not ready: <6>: Current: sense key: Not Ready kernel: Add. Sense: Logical unit not ready, initializing command required kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev sde, sector 63 kernel: Buffer I/O error on device sde1, logical block 0 kernel: lost page write due to I/O error on sde1 kernel: ext3_abort called. kernel: EXT3-fs error (device sde1): ext3_journal_start_sb: Detected aborted journal kernel: Remounting filesystem read-only I can guess that I/O means Input/Output, but other than that I'm flummoxed. My fear is that the Seagate is defective. Can someone point me in a good direction? Any input would be greatly appreciated.