Re: FreeAgent USB HDD (SOLVED - I hope!!)

[andy <geek_show@dsl.pipex.com>]

Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 29, 2007 at 06:05:24PM +0000, andy wrote:
>   
> > Hi all
> >
> > Yesterday, I bought a 500GB Seagate FreeAgent (external) USB hard drive. 
> > I plugged it in, downloaded the necessary ntfs-3g driver and all was 
> > fine. Today I plug it in and my Lenny system can't find it at all. There 
> > is nothing loaded on media and it seems that as far as my system is 
> > concerned, it has ceased to exist.
> >
> >     
> It depends: I'm using a similar drive. These drives are very prone to
> turn themselves off into power saving mode or similar / lose 
> interrupts. At this point they remount read only / with directories 
> with no permissions.
>
> A colleague used Google to find that the problem may be with SCSI 
> emulation - if you echo 1 > allow_restart in 
> /sys/block/sd*/device/scsi_disk:<numbers> the problem may go away.
>
> Known problem :(
>
> Andy
>
>
>
>
>   
> > How can I load this manually and how can I prevent this from happening 
> > again? I am not even sure how to debug this, so any help on that score 
> > would be useful too. It has something like 100GB of data on it from 
> > yesterday which I am extremely loathe to lose.
> >
> > Thanks for any assistance.
> >
> >     
>   
Andrew (& others)

Thanks for the ideas. I did a more in-depth Google search and came 
across this:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=494673

So far so good, but the proof will really be to leave it for a couple of 
hours and then see.

Holding thumbs!

Andy


--

"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers." - Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"