XFCE USB disk corruptions

[bigal]

Hi I had some window problems reported elsewhere and since they not be resolved, decided to completely reinstall XFCE.

Before doing so I backed up everything from my daughters login session which were picture files, music and work. Then unmounted and removed the USB 500Gb Seagate drive.

After reinstalling XFCE I plugged in the drive expecting to see the same directory structure that I copied previously. Only one directory exists, and its corrupt. The drive is formatted as NTFS which I understood was handled by XFCE; it had been mounted, and the copy progress and check was good.

Unfortunately, same thing happened with my FAT formatted pendrive a month previous; after file copy, the files were gone forever! Hence the reason I used my external USB hard drive which has always been robust.
I dunno, maybe its me, but I am having a lot of bother with XFCE; if others have similar problems with data being lost corrupt then please add to this thread.
Al.

[Old-Polack]

Hi I had some window problems reported elsewhere and since they not be resolved, decided to completely reinstall XFCE.

Before doing so I backed up everything from my daughters login session which were picture files, music and work. Then unmounted and removed the USB 500Gb Seagate drive.

After reinstalling XFCE I plugged in the drive expecting to see the same directory structure that I copied previously. Only one directory exists, and its corrupt. The drive is formatted as NTFS which I understood was handled by XFCE; it had been mounted, and the copy progress and check was good.

Unfortunately, same thing happened with my FAT formatted pendrive a month previous; after file copy, the files were gone forever! Hence the reason I used my external USB hard drive which has always been robust.
I dunno, maybe its me, but I am having a lot of bother with XFCE; if others have similar problems with data being lost corrupt then please add to this thread.
Al.

Personally I wouldn't backup anything I valued from a Linux installation to an NTFS formatted partition. NTFS doesn't know anything about Linux ownership or permissions. If your NTFS filesystem is corrupted now, after a check of the copy process showed it as being correct, possibly you did not unmount the partition correctly. This is known to cause corruption. Assuming you used the HAL auto mounting, did you click the Safely Remove option before disconnecting?

[bigal]

>Then unmounted and removed the USB 500Gb Seagate drive.

[Old-Polack]

>Then unmounted and removed the USB 500Gb Seagate drive.

That doesn't answer the question of "how?" Did you click the Safely Remove option before disconnecting?

[bigal]

>Then unmounted and removed the USB 500Gb Seagate drive.

That doesn't answer the question of "how?" Did you click the Safely Remove option before disconnecting?

Sorry, right click; unmount

[Old-Polack]

>Then unmounted and removed the USB 500Gb Seagate drive.

That doesn't answer the question of "how?" Did you click the Safely Remove option before disconnecting?

Sorry, right click; unmount

Is this partition listed in /etc/fstab as a permanent mount, with a fixed mount point directory, or handled by HAL, with a dynamic mount someplace in /media?

[bigal]

The latter.

[Old-Polack]

The latter.

I personally don't allow HAL to mount anything from my removable drives. As I understand the process, some writes are cached for a period, and the Safely Remove option causes those cached writes to be executed/synced (written to disk) which then allows the safe unmounting of the partition. If the disk is unmounted and removed without the Safely Remove option, before the cached writes complete, your data gets corrupted. Someone else, that actually uses the HAL mounting system, may have a better, possibly more accurate, explanation.

[bigal]

OK thanks. Ive been getting bitten a lot lately by this - ouch!

[bigal]

Unfortunately when I went to run xine/video it just kept crashing on fresh install. Google and its apparently to do with the XFCE desktop; a known problem. Sadly I am finally to give up and revert to KDE or similar. Thanks vm.
Alistair.

[bigal]

Sadly, I cant recall that exact detail; all I know is that I am well aware of safely removing drives in Linux after my previous problem using a pendrive and losing my daughters data.

[longtom]

I feel for you - this is not something one would like to struggle with at all.

I am using Phoenix daily and plug all kind of usb drives, usb stick and card readers in and out and have never had that.  I also transport whatever is on there to and fro Windows installations.
All my usb drives are formatted fat32 and are unmounted in Phoenix as well as in Windows as a matter of routine.

I know, not going to help you now - but maybe it can give you a hint how to reliably have your external usb drives working.

I am convinced that this is not an Xfce problem - nothing connected to a specific Desktop Environment would be able to do that to a drive.

Good luck with whatever you do in the future.

[bigal]

Great community, great help and my wife uses PCLinuxOS KDE with no problems. Its just that this IBM R31 has had lotsa probs with XFCE so I had to move on. Perhaps its the bunch of ants that have found it a nice warm place to stay has upset some of the hardware!!
Cheers,
Al.