I hate when this happens. I got bit by the old Kernel keeping the partition information cached when swapping USB devices. I just remembered I swapped drives shortly after rebooting and I forgot to do the "eject /dev/sda" command after removing the first drive and before inserting the new drive.
The problem was that I went from a 250G drive to a 160G drive but the kernel still had the partition information for the 250G drive when you did an "fdisk -l /dev/sda" which was causing the instability!!!!
I unmounted, ejected the file system, fsck'd the ext3 partition just to be sure and re-mounted it and I suspect it will work just fine from now on.
Gregory Gulik wrote:
I've been using an external USB 2.0 drive as a backup device on my Fedora box for a while and it's been working fine. Recently however I've been trying the Interactive kernel 2.6.6-1.435.2.3.desktop.1 and I appreciate the improved interactive response but one oddity is about every other day my /backup device (the USB drive) seems to be re-mounting itself as read only. Attempts to use the remount option don't work resulting in the error:
mount: block device /dev/sda2 is write-protected, mounting read-only
If I manually unmount the drive and mount it again it's fine again for another day or two. Unfortunately my automated backups every other day fail because they can't write to the drive.
I then have to fix the mount and re-run the backup manually.
One thing that might have something to do with it are these errors in syslog:
Jul 21 02:01:41 penguin kernel: ext3_reserve_inode_write: aborting transaction: Journal has aborted in __ext3_journal_get_write_access<2>EXT3-fs error (device sda2) in ext3_reserve_inode_write: Journal has aborted
Jul 21 02:01:41 penguin kernel: EXT3-fs error (device sda2) in ext3_orphan_del: Journal has aborted
Jul 21 02:01:41 penguin kernel: ext3_reserve_inode_write: aborting transaction: Journal has aborted in __ext3_journal_get_write_access<2>EXT3-fs error (device sda2) in ext3_reserve_inode_write: Journal has aborted
Jul 21 02:01:41 penguin kernel: EXT3-fs error (device sda2) in ext3_delete_inode: Journal has aborted
Jul 21 02:01:42 penguin kernel: EXT3-fs abort (device sda2): ext3_journal_start: Detected aborted journal
Jul 21 14:18:52 penguin kernel: EXT3-fs abort (device sda2): ext3_remount: Abort forced by user
Jul 21 14:18:59 penguin kernel: EXT3-fs abort (device sda2): ext3_remount: Abort forced by user
-- Greg Gulik http://www.gulik.org/greg/ greg @ gulik.org
