How to remove a damaged file

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Thu, 2008-04-24 at 15:31 +0100, Anne Wilson wrote:
> On Wednesday 23 April 2008 20:59, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> > On Wed, 2008-04-23 at 20:49 +0100, Anne Wilson wrote:
> > > On Wednesday 23 April 2008 17:56, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> > > > > > For this one I'd rather have an ext3 partition, if I can't recover
> > > > > > it.
> > > > >
> > > > > then I suggest more along the lines of:
> > > > > mke2fs -v -c -c -j -L AnneWilsonPendrive  /dev/devicepartition
> > > > >
> > > > > '-c -c' -- Check the device for bad blocks before creating the file
> > > > > system. using a  slower,  read-write test instead of a fast read-only
> > > > > test.
> > >
> > > I used that, and now I have the new partition, ext3.  However, although
> > > it lists, it says I can't write to it.
> > >
> > > brwxrwx--- 1 anne users 8, 49 Apr 23 20:37 /dev/sdd1
> > >
> > > I'm trying to copy a directory 'Packages' from my desktop to the
> > > daneElec. That gives
> > >
> > > Access denied to /media/DaneElec/Packages.
> > >
> > > if done in the gui, or
> > >
> > > cp: cannot create regular file
> > > `/media/DaneElec/zsh-4.3.4-7.fc9.i386.rpm': Permission denied
> 
> > >  if done from the CLI.  What am Imissing?
> >
> > Can you create anything on the pendrive (try "> /media/DaneElec/foo")?
> > Is the pendrive mounted read/write?
> > Are you doing this as root or as yourself?
> > Please post the output of "ls -ld /media/DaneElec", and of "mount|grep
> > DaneElec".
> >
> I don't really remember where I had got to last night.  This morning, though, 
> I discovered that I couldn't copy/move as user, but I could as root, so I'm 
> doing that at the moment.  It's been running for the last 5.5 hours!  I'd 
> forgotten just how slow usb 1.1 is :-)  

Yech! I was assuming USB 2, but of course it's an old laptop. Expect the
install to take a while too ...

> In another hour or so I'll have everything on the pen-drive.  The first thing 
> I'll try is making sure that existing repos are disabled, then put my local 
> one as the first stanza in the rawhide one, and try to upgrade from that.
> 
> If I can't find any way to do it I'll have to burn a boot.img onto a CD and 
> hope that I can continue from the pen-drive.  I've never done anything like 
> that, but I understand that it should work.  If there are any pointers, just 
> in case, I'd like to hear them.

I'm also fairly sure it can be done (without ever having to do it), but
try configuring the BIOS to boot from the USB stick before you do this.
Some can, some can't.

poc