Ubuntu destroys filesystem on attached USB harddrive!

Michael,

Thanks for your report. Can you make your USB drive read-only, attach it, then attach the output of this command:
 dosfsck -v -n <partition>

Hi there
Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering is this still an issue for you? Can you try with latest Ubuntu release?

Thanks in advance.

We are closing this bug report because it lacks the information we need to investigate the problem, as described in the previous comments. Please reopen it if you can give us the missing information, and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future. To reopen the bug report you can click on the current status, under the Status column, and change the Status back to "New". Thanks again!.

Same thing happened to me:
A mounted USB drive with only one partition on it got really messed up. I had the same thing happening to me a week before (that time killing a UFS and a HFS+ partition) but was attributed it to an user error that time.

This time, I searched back in /var/log/messages and found this:

Feb 25 21:42:38 helium kernel: [286882.584017] usb 8-2: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 21
Feb 25 21:42:38 helium kernel: [286882.717067] usb 8-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
Feb 25 21:42:38 helium kernel: [286882.717582] hub 8-2:1.0: USB hub found
Feb 25 21:42:38 helium kernel: [286882.717624] hub 8-2:1.0: 4 ports detected
Feb 25 21:42:38 helium kernel: [286882.996129] usb 8-2.2: new low speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 22
Feb 25 21:42:38 helium kernel: [286883.109560] usb 8-2.2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
Feb 25 21:42:38 helium kernel: [286883.113027] input: Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.7/usb8/8-2/8-2.2/8-2.2:1.0/input/input16
Feb 25 21:42:38 helium kernel: [286883.152101] input,hidraw0: USB HID v1.10 Mouse [Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse] on usb-0000:00:1d.7-2.2
Feb 25 21:42:38 helium kernel: [286883.240131] usb 8-2.3: new low speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 23
Feb 25 21:42:38 helium kernel: [286883.354165] usb 8-2.3: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
Feb 25 21:42:38 helium kernel: [286883.359277] input: Unicomp Endura Keyboard as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.7/usb8/8-2/8-2.3/8-2.3:1.0/input/input17
Feb 25 21:42:38 helium kernel: [286883.416158] input,hidraw1: USB HID v1.10 Keyboard [Unicomp Endura Keyboard ] on usb-0000:00:1d.7-2.3
Feb 25 21:45:07 helium kernel: [287032.053614] attempt to access beyond end of device
Feb 25 21:45:07 helium kernel: [287032.053619] sdc1: rw=0, want=18310001848, limit=976768002
Feb 25 21:45:07 helium kernel: [287032.055239] attempt to access beyond end of device
Feb 25 21:45:07 helium kernel: [287032.055243] sdc1: rw=0, want=7309129216, limit=976768002
Feb 25 21:45:07 helium kernel: [287032.072524] attempt to access beyond end of device

I (re)attached a keyboard and mouse on an usb hub to the system there. This seems to have messed up a lot of usb stuff (see the sdc1 stuff going wrong directly following it - that didnt happen before).
The USB controllers on this machine are "USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 02)".
Unfortunately it can take quite some time until this becomes noticable because of caching.

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering is this still an issue for you? Could you try to reproduce the same with Ubuntu 9.04? Thanks in advance.

We are closing this bug report because it lacks the information we need to investigate the problem, as described in the previous comments. Please reopen it if you can give us the missing information, and don\'t hesitate to submit bug reports in the future. To reopen the bug report you can click on the current status, under the Status column, and change the Status back to New. Thanks again!.

This report looks very familiar to me. I installed Ubuntu 9.04 on a USB stick to boot it from a Dell D520 laptop, and after a day or so the device just went off, usually during Nautilus use: the desktop reported resources to be unavailable. At first, rebooting was possible, but after a while it would happen again. Finally, the USB stick did not boot anymore, and was fully destroyed, No PC / OS will recognize it anymore. I blamed it on the stick (OCZ Technology, 32G ), which I plan to return to the seller shortly.
No I installed Ubuntu 9.04 on a USB external disk (Plextor 160GB). Again, after a few days using it on the Dell D520 laptop, the device just went off. I shut it down immediately and did not reboot until yesterday evening. Then, I tried to boot one more time on the Dell D520, but it failed during logon.
After that, I booted from the USB disk on my old Dell D600 laptop. It worked, but took a lot of time, and very heavy disk use, judged by the activity display on the disk. After shutting down an rebooting a few times the device now works good on the D600.

After this experience, it seems to me there's a serious problem in the combination of Ubuntu (9.04 in my case) and Dell D520 where the USB is quite heavily used (as the USB device is used as the boot harddisk).

In the next days, I will do some more testing on the USB external hard disk, and boot it on my new desktop replacing HP Compaq 6830s laptop. Then I will attach some the syslogs - from the USB external disk, not from the late USB stick. I'm not an expert on that level, but I hope thes syslogs may throw some light on the problem.
Googling around, I also found this link http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-795327.html, about agressive power management beating up harddisks on - amongst many others - the D520 laptop. Although USB is not the target in this discussion, it might be related.

Well, just uploaded the logfiles of the nearly dead USB external hard disk.

I attached the USB harddisk to the HP Compaq 6830s / system, but that system doesn't see the USB hard disk anymore, not at boot, not from Vista. Note: I installed Ubuntu 9.04 on the USB Hard disk using this same system!
So I tried booting from my old laptop Dell D600, but alas! it loses resources during login.
I booted the D600 from the internal harddisk, then plugged usb harddisk in. second attempt worked, but it was unstable, so I got the log files as soon as possible.

I will keep the USB hard disk, but be very gentle with it, to be able to help investigate the problem. Only my old (also dying) D600 will touch it, but I have no idea how long it will last.

Currently the external disk is stable and bootable from the old Dell D600; however it is still not recognized by the Dell D520 nor by the HP Compaq 6830s. With the latter, I tried connecting through a USB 1.1 hub, but it did not help.

No response yet, but I'll keep posting my experiences once in a while.
Yesterday I tried booting from the HP Compaq 6830s - it works. Vista will not recognize the disk, but BIOS does apparently. Booting and working on the HP Compaq left the harddisk unharmed, as far as I have seen.
I dare not experiment with the Dell 520 again.

Thanks for your report, that's something to send directly upstream at http://bugzilla.gnome.org by someone having the issue, for forwarding instructions please read http://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Upstream/GNOME, Thanks in advance.

I installed Ubuntu the external harddisk with the default filesystem ext3. On august 9, 2009 I converted the file system to ext2. Since that moment, I've been using the hard disk quite intensively on the Dell D520 (the one that destroyed my usb flash drive and almost destroyed the usb hard drive). It looks like this has solved the problem, I have had no trouble at all since then.

So it seems the work around for this problem is not using a journaling file system for an external usb device.

I will add this comment to the bug, too, including a link to the recent \var\log directory I'm attaching to this comment.

Correction: I converted the file system around midnight, when August 9th turned to August 10th, 2009.

Kyromaster, thank you for reporting this bug to Ubuntu. Edgy reached EOL on April 26, 2008.
See this document for currently supported Ubuntu releases: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases .

Is this reproducible on a supported release? If so, please execute the following command, as it will automatically gather debugging information, in a terminal:
apport-collect 68824

I had the same problem with gnome 15 so I switched to kubuntu which I don't care for but at least it doesn't destroy every usb stick I insert. Kubuntu does not have this problem!.

  Today I installed ubuntu 14 lts and it just destroyed a perfectly good usb stick. Let me know if you solve this problem as I can't try ubuntu every so often to see if it is fixed. I will just have to stick with kubuntu.

   @#%##&

I tried using apport-collect 68824 but it blocked me because I was not the originator of the bug report. I am putting ubuntu of my mind for now.

after I installed some programs on the usb, I was not allowed to unmount, so I just unplugged the usb stick.

I just read this:
Failure to unmount before disconnecting the device can result in loss of data and/or a corrupted file system. There are no exceptions to this rule. Be safe - unmount your drives before disconnecting them!

everything seems to work well now. Sorry for all the ##@@% and such. I will continue to use my ubuntu 14 LTS that I just installed today along side Kbuntu 15.

Closing that old report which not got recent comment.