After an exhausting night formatting my 2 laptops to 11.3 (from 11.1) i was happy everything was working ok.
I was using two usb drives to transfer data, one is a 2 TB encrypted ext 3 the other is a 1 TB ext 3 plus a smaller NTFS. Everything was working, when at some point both laptops stopped being able to mount the devices
This is the message for example for the ext3 non encrypted partition
Sorry im too exhausted to type the whole so i made a screenshot
Why on earth am i getting that and what can i do now…
I had never gotten any error msg in 11.1 and I have had the drives for years
I REALLY REALLY hope kde4 did now somehow corrupt both drives. I would seriously go crazy in that case. Its a total of 3 TB and that contains a copy each of ALL my files… :’(
I always unmounted with dolphin before unplugging :-/
I rebooted both laptops, unplugged and unpowered both drives… nothings seems to be working any longer
Thanks for any ideas
PS sorry there are typos even in the title im so tired i cant type!!
Hello G0NZ0, sorry to hear of your problems. First off consider that you may have more than one problem, even including cables or other hardware issues. Two separate Laptops could have a USB problem, but cause by different issues. For instance, encryption can never be ruled out as a potential problem. I can also attest that there was some issues with updates of the kernel that caused USB mice and keyboards to stop working AND, there is a kernel bug with openSUSE 11.3 that keeps USB3 drives from being mounted in your fstab file. So, I can tell you how to upgrade your kernel if you want, which might fix the problems or it might not help at all. You can also tell us a lot more about your laptops and more about the exact desktop type/version and kernel version. To update your kernel, go here and download Kernel 2.6.36.1 (which I recommend).
Thank you James for your reply!
I spent the whole day trying to fix and i tried fsck one of the drives (unencrypted). The result was all the partition got wiped out and the files in Lost+Found where a bunch of useless stuff. So all lost. Ontrack quoted me 1000 $ to recover a drive.
But I had another copy of a 1.5 drive which was updated 4 months ago. I am right now making a copy from that 1.5 TB drive and I just bought another 2 TB drive so that I have now at least a dual backup of all the files up to 4 months ago. The rest, is some on the camera’s SD card, some on office computers etc. I lost some tens of GB of pics movies, music and ebooks, but well there at least everything up to 4 months ago is safe.
The two drives that got corrupted are fine as to the hardware, it is only the logical file system that got corrupted
After much thinking, i came to the conclusion that the two drives got corrupted for the same cause, that is a USB extension cord I just bought. It was the first time I used it and I used it for both drives that got corrupted. All other USB devices i plugged in without that cord are working fine.
I have always been maniac with many backups on different drives (also living in an area with many earthquakes and many fires…) but now more than ever i will keep at least 4 updated copies of every single file on different drives
I spent the whole day trying to fix and i tried fsck one of the drives (unencrypted). The result was all the partition got wiped out and the files in Lost+Found where a bunch of useless stuff. So all lost. Ontrack quoted me 1000 $ to recover a drive.
But I had another copy of a 1.5 drive which was updated 4 months ago. I am right now making a copy from that 1.5 TB drive and I just bought another 2 TB drive so that I have now at least a dual backup of all the files up to 4 months ago. The rest, is some on the camera’s SD card, some on office computers etc. I lost some tens of GB of pics movies, music and ebooks, but well there at least everything up to 4 months ago is safe.
The two drives that got corrupted are fine as to the hardware, it is only the logical file system that got corrupted
After much thinking, i came to the conclusion that the two drives got corrupted for the same cause, that is a USB extension cord I just bought. It was the first time I used it and I used it for both drives that got corrupted. All other USB devices i plugged in without that cord are working fine.
I have always been maniac with many backups on different drives (also living in an area with many earthquakes and many fires…) but now more than ever i will keep at least 4 updated copies of every single file on different drives
Thanks again for your help!!
I hate very much to hear of the data loss. My daughter, a Windows user, got hit by a virus at the start of the year and lost most of her pictures. Even though grown, it caused her to cry about the situation. So I do understand how back such a thing can be. I also had a USB cable go bad on me that corrupted a backup I was trying to make, which did not work, losing my data, but this was a few years ago.
What I have done since then is of course, back up everything, once a week, including my work laptop. But more importantly, I copy all of my important stuff, to more than one place. Drives are so cheep, there is no reason to not keep a real copy in more than one place. This does not prevent you from doing stupid things with your data I can atest, but between backups and more than one copy, I have only lost one item the last year, and is was due to stupidity I regret to say.
SO, if there is anything we can do here to help, just let us know. The kernel upgrade is still an interesting thing to try if you have the time, to see what all of that is about.
Notice that the error message tells you to look at syslog or dmesg. Ie,
have a look at the log file, /var/log/messages. That would have given a
clue about what was hapening.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” at Telcontar)
I’m also sorry to read of the loss of data … Still if there is any data not backed up on another drive did you try a recovery utility ? There are many and they don’t all cost $1000.
Yes in fact I did and it was complaining of things like:
987.122243] EXT3-fs (sdc2): error: invalid journal inode
I ran a fsck manually on the first unencrypted disk, it erased every single data on it. The folder Lost+Found did not contain anything other than empty folders and unusable files.
But i recovered from a 3 months old backup drive. Then after that, I had a nice surprise and the other encrypted drive started to work again so I copied the most recent files too. At the end, I did not lose any data, especially work and pictures were my priority, everything else was not that important.
I got yet another drive (so i have a total of 9.7 TB of storage and 7 external drives) and now i will keep 600% redundancy. And drives in different locations (which I was already doing).
Thanks for your help!!
Great news that you were able to recover the important things.
You have me thinking now I need to move forward with my planned purchase of another external external hard drive (so as to have a backup for some of my external drives). I’m thinking of either a 1.5 TB Fantec or a 2 TB Fantec , with the price at our local PC shop being 104.99 (for 1.5GB) and 129.99 Euro (for 2.0 TB) respectively. Not the best price I can get, but I like to give our local PC shop business if their price is not too far off.
