new disk - rsync or hardware problem

[Shlomo Solomon]

short version: 
I have a new USB external drive. The script I used on my old disk
crashes randomly after the disk mysteriously becomes read-only.
Re-mounting solves the problem. I suspect a hardware problem, but can't
prove it and I'm sure if I go to BUG with the disk they'll say "It
doesn't support Linux. That's your problem"

long version:
I bought a new LaCie Minimus 2Tb as a backup drive. My existing backup
drive is a WD Elements 1Tb and I have a script that uses rsync to
backup all my partitions. The backup script works fine on the old disk.
Here's a sample line from the script:
rsync -rlvtogS --delete --ignore-errors  /data2  $MOUNT/data

BTW - all the partitions being backed up are on my box and the USB
backup disk is also connected to the same box - Mandriva 2011.0 with all
updates installed.

The first thing I did was to delete the pre-installed Windows
partition and create a ReiserFS partition (same as on the existing
disk). 

On the new disk, the script crashes randomly (usually after
writing between 5 to 30 Gb of data) with the following error messages:
rsync: writefd_unbuffered failed to write 4 bytes to socket [sender]:
Broken pipe (32) rsync: mkdir "/media/LaCie/data" failed: Read-only
file system (30) rsync error: error in file IO (code 11) at main.c(587)
[Receiver=3.0.8] rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (9 bytes
received so far) [sender] rsync error: error in rsync protocol data
stream (code 12) at io.c(601) [sender=3.0.8]

The backed up data is readable.

remount doesn't work
[root at shlomo1 solomon]# mount -o remount,rw /media/LaCie
mount: /dev/sdc1: can't read superblock

umount and then mount DO work
[root at shlomo1 solomon]# umount /media/LaCie
[root at shlomo1 solomon]# mkdir  /media/LaCie 
[root at shlomo1 solomon]# mount  /dev/sdc1 /media/LaCie 
[root at shlomo1 solomon]# df
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1        97G  9.9G   82G  11% /
/dev/sda6       479M  254M  201M  56% /boot
/dev/sda7       193G  107G   86G  56% /home
/dev/sdb7       117G   86G   32G  74% /data2
/dev/sdb6       440G  429G   12G  98% /data1
/dev/sdb1       178G   83G   86G  50% /data3
/dev/sdb5       196G  125G   71G  64% /public
/dev/sdc1       1.9T  136G  1.7T   8% /media/LaCie

After that I can re-run the rsync script and it continues to write data
until the next crash.


Here's part of mtab after re-mounting
[root at shlomo1 solomon]# cat /etc/mtab
/dev/sdb6 /data1 reiserfs rw 0 0
/dev/sdb1 /data3 ext4 rw,commit=0 0 0
/dev/sdc1 /media/LaCie reiserfs rw 0 0

and after "automatic" mounting - plugging in the USB:
/dev/sdb6 /data1 reiserfs rw 0 0
/dev/sdb1 /data3 ext4 rw,commit=0 0 0
/dev/sdc1 /media/LaCie reiserfs rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=udisks 0 0

But regardless of whether I mount the disk manually or automatically,
the same crash occurs.


As I wrote above, I suspect a hardware problem, but on the other hand,
if that's the case, why does re-mounting solve the problem? In any
case, I don't believe that BUG or LaCie will help me, as soon as they
hear I re-formatted the disk as Linux ReiserFS.

Any ideas?



-- 
Shlomo Solomon
http://the-solomons.net
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