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My laptop has two operating systems, Windows 11 and Arch Linux.

I have a external 4TB HDD formatted to ext4.

When I go into Windows, I normally disconnect the external drive, but not always because I sometimes forget it's connected. I normal use Linux OS.

The problem here is that for some reason, after I boot into Linux, the external drive mount read only!, and up till now, I've been unable to recover from this. This has happened to me twice with different external drives. I don't know if the windows OS changes something in the drive. I can copy the info from the disk but that's all!

I've been looking for a solution for a long time, and it's been frustrating.

I've tried chmod and chown but the result is that the drive is read only, and nothing happens!

Any Idea how to get around this?

dmesg

/etc/fstab

I ran the suggested SMART test and everything looks ok!

5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   200   200   140    Pre-fail  Always - 0


SMART Error Log Version: 1
 No Errors Logged

Did a umount and mount and everything seams to be back to normal!!!

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8
  • Do you see some logs when you run dmesg. Also, the file contents of /etc/fstab from Linux machine would be useful...
    – harshavmb
    Commented Mar 20, 2022 at 13:16
  • Hi, @harshavmb I'm not sure how to add an image, so I edited the inicial post. Hope you can see the images!
    – nonick66
    Commented Mar 20, 2022 at 13:36
  • 3
    @nonick66 Do not post links to images. Copy and past the text into the question using the code blocks.
    – Nasir Riley
    Commented Mar 20, 2022 at 13:54
  • From the images you posted, there was some problem with previous mounts, e2fsck (filesystem check) was performed & mounted as read-only as I see errors=remount-ro. Was there any power outage? Or your hardware may be genuinely failing.
    – harshavmb
    Commented Mar 20, 2022 at 14:00
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    Windows will hardly touch the partition that has partition type that it does not recognize. I even run Windows 10/11 VM on daily basis that uses the same drive that the Linux host is running on. (They don't share the same EFI system partition though and the one for the Linux host is masked with a Linux partition type GUID.) Even survives Windows updates perfectly. (IIRC you can't even delete a partition on Windows in Disk Management if the partition type code / GUID is not recognized.)
    – Tom Yan
    Commented Mar 20, 2022 at 17:17

1 Answer 1

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This happens when external drive was not properly disconnected or you shutted down the OS not properly. Then it is working as read-only till time that you check it's file system. Then the drive may be mounted as read-write. It is a function in the OS to make data safe when there might be some file system errors.

To solve this, always safely remove the drive in the operating system.

If this will happen again you will need to check the file system on the drive and then remount it once again in read-write mode.

The commands here are: mount and umount.

The problem may be related to: file system journal, file system itself, not clean unmount, some strange user behavior in the OS or failing drive.

EDIT: OP has repaired super-block and this solved his problem.

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7
  • The drive is about 3 months old! I actually have two drives with the same problem! Should I run the e2fsck and will this destroy my data?
    – nonick66
    Commented Mar 20, 2022 at 14:32
  • @nonick66 even new drives can fail. Check SMART attributes for this drive. Fsck in case of errors of the file system may mess around with some files.
    – pbies
    Commented Mar 20, 2022 at 14:44
  • Ok, thank you very much to all, I'll give it a try and get back to you.
    – nonick66
    Commented Mar 20, 2022 at 15:40
  • I found out that it's a problem with the e2fsck. I tried dumpe2fs -h /dev/sda but it can't be found { /dev/sda contém dados "DOS/MBR boot sector; partition 1 : ID=0xee, start-CHS (0x0,0,2), end-CHS (0x3ff,255,63), startsector 1, 4294967295 sectors, extended partition table (last)" }
    – nonick66
    Commented Mar 22, 2022 at 10:46
  • @nonick66 Neither of them is supposed to be run on /dev/sda but /dev/sda1 (according to your dmesg screenshot, the drive is partitioned and has one partition, which is not the same as "partitionless" btw).
    – Tom Yan
    Commented Mar 22, 2022 at 11:06

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