I get a lot of these messages in syslog... what are they and should I be concerned?  I assume its the USB stick causing it as it would be the only fat drive i know of in the system.

 

Mar 10 14:59:10 Tower kernel: FAT: Directory bread(block 510) failed

Mar 10 14:59:10 Tower kernel: FAT: Directory bread(block 511) failed

 

Thanks,

I assume its the USB stick causing it as it would be the only fat drive i know of in the system.

 

That is probably true.  Usually when those errors appear, the system has lost contact with the flash drive.  Can you post your entire syslog for us to check, captured before you reboot?

 

I have seen only a few cases of this, none recently, and I don't remember their causes.  It could be the USB port (loose or faulty), could be the flash drive is going bad, etc.

 

You will have to power off to get the system back, and most likely, it will want to start a parity check, because it cannot update the flash drive with a proper shutdown.  Any settings changes won't be saved either, until the flash drive is accessible again.

 

You can try connecting to a different USB port ...

Yup... it was the USB port... moved the drive/system to 'new' hardware and it runs fine (no more messages, can still see the USB files).

 

Thanks!

One for the wiki definitely

I've started a new Wiki page to help others analyze drive problems (The Analysis of Drive Issues), and made the drive problem above the first entry in it, "Unexpected loss of removable drive".  It is probably the only relatively complete entry of the page.  With time, more drive errors will be added to it, but it is a very rough and incomplete and disorganized page so far.