USB drive re-mounting itself as READ ONLY by itself...

[Gregory Gulik]

I've been using an external USB 2.0 drive as a backup device on my 
Fedora box for a while and it's been working fine.  Recently however 
I've been trying the Interactive kernel 2.6.6-1.435.2.3.desktop.1 and I 
appreciate the improved interactive response but one oddity is about 
every other day my /backup device (the USB drive) seems to be 
re-mounting itself as read only.  Attempts to use the remount option 
don't work resulting in the error:

mount: block device /dev/sda2 is write-protected, mounting read-only

If I manually unmount the drive and mount it again it's fine again for 
another day or two.  Unfortunately my automated backups every other day 
fail because they can't write to the drive.

I then have to fix the mount and re-run the backup manually.

One thing that might have something to do with it are these errors in 
syslog:

Jul 21 02:01:41 penguin kernel: ext3_reserve_inode_write: aborting 
transaction: Journal has aborted in 
__ext3_journal_get_write_access<2>EXT3-fs error (device sda2) in 
ext3_reserve_inode_write: Journal has aborted
Jul 21 02:01:41 penguin kernel: EXT3-fs error (device sda2) in 
ext3_orphan_del: Journal has aborted
Jul 21 02:01:41 penguin kernel: ext3_reserve_inode_write: aborting 
transaction: Journal has aborted in 
__ext3_journal_get_write_access<2>EXT3-fs error (device sda2) in 
ext3_reserve_inode_write: Journal has aborted
Jul 21 02:01:41 penguin kernel: EXT3-fs error (device sda2) in 
ext3_delete_inode: Journal has aborted
Jul 21 02:01:42 penguin kernel: EXT3-fs abort (device sda2): 
ext3_journal_start: Detected aborted journal
Jul 21 14:18:52 penguin kernel: EXT3-fs abort (device sda2): 
ext3_remount: Abort forced by user
Jul 21 14:18:59 penguin kernel: EXT3-fs abort (device sda2): 
ext3_remount: Abort forced by user

-- 
Greg Gulik                                 http://www.gulik.org/greg/
greg @ gulik.org