Odd F36 behavior with external storage

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1

I set up a backup directory on an external USB drive on F36, then connected it to a Windows machine to copy files.

However, F36 would not detect the drive after the copying; an old F35 machine did, as did the Windows machine when I reconnected it.

After some fruitless attempts to debug, I pulled a Microsoft and restarted F36.

The USB drive is now recognized by F36 again and a sample of the backup files seems correct.

Anyone have any hints on how I can figure out what happened?

journalctl shows several lines like

kernel: Buffer I/O error on dev sdf1, logical block 6217712, lost async page write

and then

udisksd[1101]: Mounted /dev/sdf1 at /run/media/dad/FreeAgent GoFlex Drive on behalf of uid 1000
ntfs-3g[624373]: Mounted /dev/sdf1 (Read-Write, label "FreeAgent GoFlex Drive", NTFS 3.1)
udisksd[1101]: Error opening /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:01.1/0000:01:00.0/usb2/2-5/2-5:1.0/host15/target15:0:0/15:0:0:0/block/sdf/sdf1/uevent while triggering uevent: No such file or directory
udisksd[1101]: Error opening /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:01.1/0000:01:00.0/usb2/2-5/2-5:1.0/host15/target15:0:0/15:0:0:0/block/sdf/sdf1/uevent while triggering uevent: No such file or directory
ntfs-3g[624373]: Mount options: nodev,nosuid,uhelper=udisks2,allow_other,nonempty,relatime,rw,default_permissions,fsname=/dev/sdf1,blkdev,blksize=4096
ntfs-3g[624373]: Unmounting /dev/sdf1 (FreeAgent GoFlex Drive)
ntfs-3g[624373]: Failed to sync device /dev/sdf1: Input/output error
ntfs-3g[624373]: Failed to close volume /dev/sdf1: Input/output error

but it was never actually mounted in any way I could detect.

Anyone have any clues on how to approach this problem?

Thanks!
Fred

2

I/O errors are never good – this basically means the system tried to read from (or write to) the device and it failed. Same applies to the failed mount attempt. This usually means that either the disk or the connection is faulty. Check the disk using SMART (GNOME Disks can do that from GUI and Windows definitely has similar tools for checking disk health), it might be dying. Bad cable or the USB port can be also causing this, because everything seems to be working now, it’s possible it was just a loose connection and the disk got physically unplugged.

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