broken file systems on external drives don't alert user but just remount as read-only

[h2g2bob]

Binary package hint: hal

Both the person from Question #58528 and myself have had usb flash drives with broken msdos file systems. What we see is the drive is magically mounted as read-only (reading through forum posts this can sometimes happen part way through accessing the drive).

Most users would simply be confused by this - is there a way of alerting the user when this happens? (Also, is there an easy graphical tool for fsck - gparted can do it i think, but is a bit scary).

syslog for mounting a broken ms-dos file system on /dev/sdd:

Jan 25 01:47:47 iffish hald: mounted /dev/sdd on behalf of uid 1000
Jan 25 01:47:48 iffish kernel: [10593.830088] FAT: Filesystem panic (dev sdd)
Jan 25 01:47:48 iffish kernel: [10593.830108] invalid access to FAT (entry 0x29da9fd4)
Jan 25 01:47:48 iffish kernel: [10593.830116] File system has been set read-only
Jan 25 01:47:48 iffish kernel: [10593.833931] FAT: Filesystem panic (dev sdd)
Jan 25 01:47:48 iffish kernel: [10593.833946] invalid access to FAT (entry 0xcf9c0c98)
Jan 25 01:47:48 iffish kernel: [10593.836532] FAT: Filesystem panic (dev sdd)
Jan 25 01:47:48 iffish kernel: [10593.836546] invalid access to FAT (entry 0x525d6441)
Jan 25 01:52:10 iffish kernel: [10855.676453] FAT: Filesystem panic (dev sdd)
Jan 25 01:52:10 iffish kernel: [10855.676477] invalid access to FAT (entry 0x29da9fd4)
Jan 25 01:52:10 iffish kernel: [10855.682670] FAT: Filesystem panic (dev sdd)
Jan 25 01:52:10 iffish kernel: [10855.682687] invalid access to FAT (entry 0xcf9c0c98)

user@iffish:~$ lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu 8.10
Release: 8.10
user@iffish:~$ uname -a
Linux iffish 2.6.27-9-generic #1 SMP Thu Nov 20 21:57:00 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux
user@iffish:~$ dpkg-query -l '*hal*'
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Cfg-files/Unpacked/Failed-cfg/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Hold/Reinst-required/X=both-problems (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name Version Description
+++-=========================-=========================-==================================================================
ii hal 0.5.11-4ubuntu4 Hardware Abstraction Layer
ii hal-cups-utils 0.6.17+git20080728-0ubunt CUPS integration with HAL
ii hal-info 20081124-0ubuntu1~intrepi Hardware Abstraction Layer - fdi files
ii libhal-storage1 0.5.11-4ubuntu4 Hardware Abstraction Layer - shared library for storage devices
ii libhal1 0.5.11-4ubuntu4 Hardware Abstraction Layer - shared library
ii pulseaudio-module-hal 0.9.10-2ubuntu9.2 HAL device detection module for PulseAudio sound server
user@iffish:~$

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug. This bug has already been reported but please feel free to report any other bugs you find.