had another recent scare with the ext3 file system. this time, fortunately, there was a happy ending. i had an external usb drive that suddenly started behaving strange when i attempted to copy files to it. the file copy was just flat out rejected. i tried unmounting and remounting the drive – same thing. eventually i checked dmesg and saw that every time i attempted a file copy the drive would change to read-only. the error message was “journal was aborted”. i figured that a fsck was in order, but at the same time was afraid to do so because of a certain past experience.

i took precautions by rsyncing the data to another drive. that went okay, all except for one file which gave an input/output error. i tried copying that same file manually and received a similar error. so at this point i was ready to unmount the drive and do a “fsck -y”. originally i did a plain fsck, but there was a tremendous amount of fsck messages to confirm. i figured the data was done for at this point. at the end of the fsck the journal was automatically recreated.

i wanted to verify the drive wasn’t physically damaged so i ran “badblocks -v” on it and it turned out okay. this process took 13 hours to run on a 1.5TB drive.

at the end of this endeavor all the data appeared to be intact and the file that used to give input/output errors no longer did. the lost+found directory contained a handful of junk files, nothing that appeared to be useful. so, this experience went rather well.

update  9/10/2012:
the previous experience went well, but the current one went horrible. the same drive about a week later started displaying the same symptoms. i hooked it to my laptop to check the SMART status and evidently it has bad sectors. even worse news is that the 2nd mirrored drive also has bad sectors. both of these drives are western digital elements external drives. what’s really disappointing and frustrating is that i’ve only had these drives for a little over 2 years. and it was a massive investment to get them in 2010. i’ve looked online and other people seem to have similar issues with any of the western digital green series. what a shame…i’ve never had any issues with WD drives until now.

for comparison sake, i also have 2 maxtor onetouch drives that i’ve had for a little over 4 years. one of these drives is pretty active almost 24/7 and it exhibits no issues still to this day.

source:
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/37659/the-beginners-guide-to-linux-disk-utilities/