F17: trying to diagnose problem with external USB drive

[M. Fioretti]

On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 07:54:15 AM -0400, G.Wolfe Woodbury wrote:
> On 07/18/2012 08:03 AM, M. Fioretti wrote:
> >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
> >
> Looks to me like there are too many files for the sinple FAT16
> directory structure on the device.

I  understand what you say, but:

the folder that I am backing up contains <25k files total, in lots of
folders and subfolders, and afaik the max number of files for vfat
(both 16 and 32) is well above that number

above all, I was doing this backup on two different USB external
drives of different size (500 and 128 GB), both with enough space to
host that folder (which is ~110 GB) and both vfat. But there was no
problem with the bigger drive.

If the number of files is the problem, why would it happen only on the
smallest drive? Simply because it is smaller, e.g. with less blocks,
even if the number of files is well below the vfat maximum?

Thanks,
Marco