USB key falls into read-only file system

[GreyGeek]

Yeah, I never wear my telephone in the pocket over my Pacemaker. (Indicator of age...) Serious!

I always carried my flip phone in a belt holster. In December of 2014 I purchased an iPhone 6+ and began carrying in my left front shirt pocket. On Sept 16, 2016 I had my first episode of AFib + Tachycardia. It went away within a week. A year later, on Sept 15, 2017 I had my second episode of AFib + tachycardia. It popped in and out for 8 weeks before becoming persistent AFib, for which I now take Metropolol and warfarin. Do I suspect my phone as being the cause? I think being an over weight 76 year old with a sedentary life style is a better explanation. At least my fingers are well exercised on this keyboard! (Besides, life has a 100% mortality rate, so enjoy what you have!)

[joneall]

I suspect all phones generate at least some magnetic fields and I often carry my phone in my front pocket - where I might also put a thumb drive. Something to be aware of at least.

Yeah, I never wear my telephone in the pocket over my Pacemaker. (Indicator of age...) Serious!

[oshunluvr]

Funny thing happened this week sort of related to this: My new cell phone (less than two weeks old) has an internal magnet to facilitate attaching an external 360 degree camera. I went out a couple nights ago with my mag-strip hotel key in my back pocket with my phone. Well, obviously I suppose, I could not get back into my hotel room! The magnet in the phone wiped the key. Thank goodness I haven't been carrying my work-related thumb drives along with my phone!

I suspect all phones generate at least some magnetic fields and I often carry my phone in my front pocket - where I might also put a thumb drive. Something to be aware of at least.

I agree with dibl on this topic. As I've never had this happen in more than a decade of using a thumb drives, something is very wrong somewhere.

[dibl]

If I run gparted, the only thing it will allow me to do with the bad key is to unmount it. Then, while looking for partitions on the key, gparted crashes.

That's a concerning report. If you can't examine the key with gparted, something is way wrong, and possibly with more than just the USB key.

Question: Are you able to use one of these problematic keys on more than one computer? Can you get access to another linux system and work with the same key, and determine whether you can (a) partition, (b) format, and (c) reliably save, retrieve, and delete files on it?

If one of your suspect keys works (repeatedly) correctly on computer A, but can be shown repeatedly to fail on computer B, then the problem is not the key, it's the computer in which the key fails.

[NickStone]

Follow the instructions as in here.

[GreyGeek]

If the blade or metal chassis of your Swiss Army Knife cannot pick up a thumb tack or paper clip then it is not magnetized enough to bother your USB sticks.

I always carry three USB drives in my watch pocket, along with two sets of keys. Never had a problem with any of them booting or running as expected.

[oshunluvr]

Hmm. Do you think keeping the key in my pocket along with a swiss army knife could damage it? I"ve heard stories about car or house keys doing that.

On the surface, that doesn't seem likely. However, when I carry mine in my pocket I do so in an otherwise empty one. I supposed your knife, being steel, could have developed a small amount of magnetization. Long enough exposure to even a small magnetic field could cause bit-flipping I think. You must carry it a lot with that knife along side it.

How often does this sort of corruption occur? Here's an experiment; Start carrying two thumbs drives - one with the knife and your pocket change, the other alone. Use them both identically - double every action and always keep the same one in the empty pocket. If corruption occurs - you'll have your answer,.

Or maybe it's your magnetic personality!

[joneall]

Hmm. Do you think keeping the key in my pocket along with a swiss army knife could damage it? I"ve heard stories about car or house keys doing that.

[oshunluvr]

Something seriously amiss somewhere. I can't ever recall a USB thumb drive becoming that corrupted, much less several of them. I did get a hold of a Chinese knock-off SD card once that was fake formatted like GG described. If this is happening to you often, you might want to review your storage habits (like - where you keep your thumb drives) or the PC that's causing this. I've even had an old Sandisk go through the laundry without losing data!

If you're looking to wipe the USB stick, use dd on it. Just run "sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sde" - MAKE SURE THE USB DRIVE IS SDE OR DEATH AWAITS YOU (with nasty big pointy teeth)! Then you should be able to re-format it. You should run fsck on any new file system before putting files on it.

[joneall]

If I run gparted, the only thing it will allow me to do with the bad key is to unmount it. Then, while looking for partitions on the key, gparted crashes.

So how do you format a key without partitions? To me that's the whole reason for formatting.

[joneall]

What is the brand of your USB keys and how big are they?
Could they be faked Chinese knockoffs? The ones that claim to be, say, 16GB but are actually only 4 or 2?
I use USB keys for both LiveUSB with persistence, and, for data storage too.

The one in question with the file xx is a Transcend USB 3.0 32GB.

I too use them for live install storage. Installed Neon that way.

[GreyGeek]

What is the brand of your USB keys and how big are they?
Could they be faked Chinese knockoffs? The ones that claim to be, say, 16GB but are actually only 4 or 2?
I use USB keys for both LiveUSB with persistence, and, for data storage too.

[joneall]

USB key files corrupted

When I take a closer look at the USB key, I see a couple of interesting things.

(1) Some files are corrupted. The ls command gives all sorts of weird symbols like you would expect from a binary file.

(2) From the point on where I try to delete a directory at a higher level, I get the error, the file system goes read-only (altho I know not how or where) AND, curiously, Dolphin does not even display the delete command when you right click on a file in the file system.

Since this has occurred several times with different USB keys, I am starting to question the effectiveness/utility of using them for backups.

I only use them for punctual backups, to have my latest modified document in my pocket. (Paranoia...) I regularly run areca backup for a more complete backup. But areca is slow for recovery.

[GreyGeek]

USB key falls into read-only file system

FAT32 has six attributes, of which you can only change two: read_only and hidden


Either command set can be used but out of habit I use
sudo apt update
sudo apt full-upgrade

[joneall]

I should have mentioned that the key is formatted FAT32. Does that support file attributes?

And here:

$ findmnt
TARGET                                SOURCE     FSTYPE     OPTIONS
/                                     /dev/sda5  ext4       rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro,data=ordered
├─/sys                                sysfs      sysfs      rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime
│ ├─/sys/kernel/security              securityfs securityfs rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime
│ ├─/sys/fs/cgroup                    tmpfs      tmpfs      ro,nosuid,nodev,noexec,mode=755
│ │ ├─/sys/fs/cgroup/systemd          cgroup     cgroup     rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,xattr,release_agent=/lib/systemd
│ │ ├─/sys/fs/cgroup/freezer          cgroup     cgroup     rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,freezer
│ │ ├─/sys/fs/cgroup/devices          cgroup     cgroup     rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,devices
│ │ ├─/sys/fs/cgroup/net_cls,net_prio cgroup     cgroup     rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,net_cls,net_prio
│ │ ├─/sys/fs/cgroup/perf_event       cgroup     cgroup     rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,perf_event
│ │ ├─/sys/fs/cgroup/blkio            cgroup     cgroup     rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,blkio
│ │ ├─/sys/fs/cgroup/memory           cgroup     cgroup     rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,memory
│ │ ├─/sys/fs/cgroup/hugetlb          cgroup     cgroup     rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,hugetlb
│ │ ├─/sys/fs/cgroup/cpu,cpuacct      cgroup     cgroup     rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,cpu,cpuacct
│ │ ├─/sys/fs/cgroup/cpuset           cgroup     cgroup     rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,cpuset
│ │ └─/sys/fs/cgroup/pids             cgroup     cgroup     rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,pids
│ ├─/sys/fs/pstore                    pstore     pstore     rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime
│ ├─/sys/firmware/efi/efivars         efivarfs   efivarfs   rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime
│ ├─/sys/kernel/debug                 debugfs    debugfs    rw,relatime
│ └─/sys/fs/fuse/connections          fusectl    fusectl    rw,relatime
├─/proc                               proc       proc       rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime
│ └─/proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc          systemd-1  autofs     rw,relatime,fd=32,pgrp=1,timeout=0,minproto=5,maxproto=5,direct
├─/dev                                udev       devtmpfs   rw,nosuid,relatime,size=4009488k,nr_inodes=1002372,mode=755
│ ├─/dev/pts                          devpts     devpts     rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,gid=5,mode=620,ptmxmode=000
│ ├─/dev/shm                          tmpfs      tmpfs      rw,nosuid,nodev
│ ├─/dev/hugepages                    hugetlbfs  hugetlbfs  rw,relatime
│ └─/dev/mqueue                       mqueue     mqueue     rw,relatime
├─/run                                tmpfs      tmpfs      rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,size=806188k,mode=755
│ ├─/run/lock                         tmpfs      tmpfs      rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,size=5120k
│ └─/run/user/1000                    tmpfs      tmpfs      rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,size=806188k,mode=700,uid=1000,gid=1001
├─/home/jon/jon-files                 /dev/sda4  ext4       rw,relatime,data=ordered
├─/boot/efi                           /dev/sda1  vfat       rw,relatime,fmask=0077,dmask=0077,codepage=437,iocharset=iso8859
├─/mnt/areca-bak                      /dev/sdb2  ext4       rw,relatime,stripe=32750,data=ordered
├─/samba-transfer                     /dev/sdc6  ext4       rw,relatime,data=ordered
├─/home/jon/music-mp3                 /dev/sdc5  ext4       rw,relatime,data=ordered
├─/home/jon/our-pix                   /dev/sdc4  ext4       rw,relatime,data=ordered
└─/media/jon/T321                     /dev/sde   vfat       rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,uid=1000,gid=1001,fmask=0022,dmask

The one in question is /media/jon/T321 on /dev/sde. Thanks for putting me onto the findmnt command. Any other gems like that?

Btw, should I update Neon with "apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade" or with "pkcon refresh; pkcon update"?