A few years ago I bought a USB Disk sternum because of the limited space that I could offer to the files inside the computer (and also for me some healthy backup at regular intervals), and I opted for a nice LaCie the 1tb memory. I'm talking about even a few years ago, it was in fact the most capacious hard on the consumer market.

Just today, despite the apparent normal ignition, I realize that in addition to the classic blue light indicates that the operation of the device, he's added una rossa that certainly does not make me hopeful. I'm going to ripescarmi the PDF manual that I had lungimirantemente copied to my hard drive and I find that the red light indicates a disk error.

Very good, At this point I go ahead with reading, somewhere there must be written as “solve” disk errors, but in spite of myself I find that un’utility for that particular case my (or a buffer solution provided by LaCie same) not provided nor through digital media, nor even as an explanation of the phenomenon.

After the first five minutes of indignation against the LaCie (You can not tell me that there is a problem and do not tell me a possible solution) I try to be good user GNU / Linux to solve the problem alone, LaCie perhaps was expected that I would contact technical support, but I had the best.

First, the problem I note that the problem does not affect the operation of all my hard, I can access it easily read and write. What is much more likely that you have burned a few clusters and the disk after its pre-ignition internal scan I report a problem.

Very good, I remembered a great command line tool to scan disks: “fsck“. I'm going to read my manual and I find that to be launched towards a disk that is not mounted, avoid serious damage to the same. At my USB drive is assigned the resource “/dev/sdb“, the data resides in the first partition (the principale). Therefore the command to disassemble.

[user@localhost ~]$ sudo umount / dev/sdb1

We become superuser and insert the password ie root.

[user@localhost ~]$ its

Then we launch “fsck” and “solve” errors automatically with the variable “-a”.

[root@localhost ~]# fsck -a /dev/sdb1

The output will be roughly the following:

fsck from util-linux-ng 2.17.2
dosfsck 3.0.9, 31 Jan 2010, FAT32, LFN
There are differences between boot sector and its backup.
Differences: (offset:original/backup)
65:01/00
Not automatically fixing this.
FATs differ but appear to be intact. Using first FAT.
Performing changes.
/dev/sdb1: 222962 files, 12508840/30516550 clusters

Obviously the more the disk is large, longer it takes for the program to perform full scans.

In conclusion it is always good to keep your data safe, not only because our information can not be read by third parties, but especially for have access to them tomorrow in case of failures. Backups are our only solution.