Cannot Access usb3 «Seagate Expansion Drive»

English Hardware
#1

Running the latest openSUSE 13.2 and Gnome 3.14.3, kernel 3.16.7-7-desktop x86_64 on a workstation.
I mounted a new 2TB Seagate Expansion Drive for local backup via a usb3 port. The disk was detected and mounted automatic. I created a couple of directories on it and started copying three file trees included /home from the workstation internal drives using Nautilus. After about 100GB of 320GB total, the system crached.

Now after several reboot, the usb3 disk won’t mount again. Clicking on the ‘Seagate Expansion Drive’ in Nautilus, the following error message popup:

Cannot access «Seagate Expansion Drive»
Error mounting /dev/sdd1 at /run/media/terje/Seagate Expansion Drive: Command-line `mount -t “ntfs” -o
“uhelper=udisks2,nodev,nosuid,uid=1000,gid=100,dmask=0077,fmask=0177” “/dev/sdd1”
“/run/media/terje/Seagate Expansion Drive”’ exited with non-zero exit status 13: $MFTMirr does not
match $MFT (record 0).
Failed to mount ‘/dev/sdd1’: Input/output error
NTFS is either inconsistent, or there is a hardware fault, or it’s a
SoftRAID/FakeRAID hardware. In the first case run chkdsk /f on Windows
then reboot into Windows twice. The usage of the /f parameter is very
important! If the device is a SoftRAID/FakeRAID then first activate
it and mount a different device under the /dev/mapper/ directory, (e.g.
/dev/mapper/nvidia_eahaabcc1). Please see the ‘dmraid’ documentation
for more details.

Any ideas why this happened and still happends?

Obviously the usb Expansion drive was ntfs formatted by default. It also had a few windows tools on it.
By right-clicking ‘Seagate Expansion Drive’ in Nautilus and selecting Properties, it seems like formatting the disk is still possible.

As I have no Windows available, I wonder if it is quite ok to try to format the usb Expansion drive to Ext4 when the purpose is being a backup disk for Linux only? Of course it won’t be portable to other systems as with ntfs, but yet?

Thanks,
Terje J. Hanssen

#2

Yes, that’s fine. But it might not solve your problem. You cannot mount now, because the drive has errors that need correcting. You probably won’t have that problem with “ext4”, since you can use “fsck” as needed. But you might still get unexpected disconnects.

My guess is that there’s an underlying hardware issue that causes a disconnect from the drive.

Is this a drive powered by the USB connection? I have not had problems with those (yet). But I have heard complaints from others, that it doesn’t always supply enough power.

#3

Yes, only the 18" usb3 cable included with the Seagate Expansion Portable 2TB Hard Drive is connected according to
http://www.seagate.com/gb/en/external-hard-drives/portable-hard-drives/standard/expansion-portable/#features
http://www.seagate.com/gb/en/external-hard-drives/portable-hard-drives/standard/expansion-portable/#specs

The workstation’s Asus mainboard with relative early usb3 support is specified here
http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/M4A89GTD_PROUSB3/specifications/

#4

Well, I formatted the usb3 drive with Ext4 filesystem. It mounted automatic after first reboot and I was able to backup the file systems with no further problems, at least not so far.

I experienced ‘rsync -av’ as backup command with root access was safest to avoid issue with file access and for easy follow up with incremental backup. The downside was that the usb3 speed was shown to be below 40 MB/s at its maximum.