F17: trying to diagnose problem with external USB drive

[M. Fioretti]

Greetings,

I'm running F17 x86_64, and I have a problem with one of the external
USB drives I use for backups.

Changing _cable_ doesn't make any difference. The problem never
happens with my other drives, so the most likely explanation is that
this one is slowly breaking, and it is time to replace it.

However, I'd like your opinion, to be 100% sure that this is the case,
instead of some weird software issue, to understand exactly what is
happening, and if/how the drive can be recovered.

I formatted the drive with

mkdosfs -F 32  /dev/sdb1

when I run commands like this (the YYYYMMDD directory contains several
files not over 2GB each):

cp -r -p /backups/20120717 /media/LACIE/backups

nothing bad happens. But when I rsync my photo backup folder:

rsync -rpvt --delete /photo/ /media/LACIE/photo

the drives ALWAYS becomes read-only at some point, thus making rsync fail

dmesg says (complete output below) that:

[625087.410234] FAT-fs (sdb1): error, fat_free_clusters: deleting FAT entry beyond EOF
[625087.410239] FAT-fs (sdb1): Filesystem has been set read-only

So, is this surely an hw failure, or may it be something else? And why
it always happens with rsync, but never with cp -r?

Thanks,
Marco

[622009.923795] sd 13:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI disk
[624919.873452] usb 2-2: USB disconnect, device number 10
[624974.082689] usb 2-2: new high-speed USB device number 11 using ehci_hcd
[624974.199631] usb 2-2: New USB device found, idVendor=04b4, idProduct=6830
[624974.199635] usb 2-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=56, Product=72, SerialNumber=91
[624974.199638] usb 2-2: Product: Lacie Mobile Drive
[624974.199640] usb 2-2: Manufacturer: Lacie Group. SA
[624974.199642] usb 2-2: SerialNumber: DEF10DFCA811
[624974.351335] scsi14 : usb-storage 2-2:1.0
[624974.351433] usbcore: registered new interface driver ums-cypress
[624975.354748] scsi 14:0:0:0: Direct-Access     WDC WD12 00BEVE-11UYT0    0000 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0
[624975.356027] sd 14:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
[624975.358354] sd 14:0:0:0: [sdb] 234441648 512-byte logical blocks: (120 GB/111 GiB)
[624975.359350] sd 14:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
[624975.359355] sd 14:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 27 00 00 00
[624975.360348] sd 14:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page present
[624975.360353] sd 14:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[624975.363849] sd 14:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page present
[624975.363854] sd 14:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[624975.413127]  sdb: sdb1
[624975.416025] sd 14:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page present
[624975.416030] sd 14:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[624975.416033] sd 14:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI disk
[625087.410234] FAT-fs (sdb1): error, fat_free_clusters: deleting FAT entry beyond EOF
[625087.410239] FAT-fs (sdb1): Filesystem has been set read-only

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