[NTLUG:Discuss] Drive becoming read-only after 40 minutes?!?

[Steve Baker]

Stephen Davidson wrote:
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> Fred wrote:
>   
>> On Wed, 19 Sep 2007 steve at sjbaker.org wrote:
>>     
>>> booting SuSE 10.2 from a 300Gb 
>>> UDB drive.  It boots OK, runs just fine for ~40 minutes then quite 
>>> suddenly any access to the drive produces a message saying that I can't 
>>> write to the drive because it's read-only?!
>>>       
>> Welcome to Suse 10.2. That is a known bug, has to do with heavy
>> disk activity. It was discussed at some length on the opensuse forum
>> opensuse at opensuse.org
>>
>> The problem is a device timeout. Try their suggestion:
>>
>>  add the line "echo 120 > /sys/block/sda/device/timeout" to /etc/init.d/boot.local
>>
>> Fred
>>
>>     
> Something else to be aware of, USB (Flash) devices only have a limited
> number of writes, something like 100K.  Fine for storing user files,
> etc.  But for heavy writes (like system logs), tends to burn them out
> pretty quickly.
>   
Yeah - I'm aware of that.  It's not a flash-drive it's a real, honest to 
goodness
full-sized 300Gb hard drive on a USB-2.0 interface.  It's made by Segate 
and it's
called a "FreeAgent".  I've used it a lot as a place to automatically 
back up
files on my desktop machine at home - the drive itself is solid and worked
well under SuSE 9.xx - although it was never really hammered like it is now
that it's my only drive.

This is not exactly the setup I'd normally want to use but for various
reasons I'm temporarily stuck away from home with a Windows laptop
that I need to leave strictly unmodified because it's not mine. (Although
I yanked the harddrive out just to be on the safe side while I was
trying to get Linux to boot off of the USB...I guess SOME people
would call that 'modification'! :-) ...I can put that back now that things
seem to be booting OK...but I don't need Windows and I'd rather sort
this problem out in a simpler setup first.