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I have an external hard drive which works for several minutes at a time, and then un-mounts itself. I am trying to copy 300GB of data off of it. I'd like a program that works like Dolphin (the Kubuntu file manager) for copying, but when a file fails to copy I want it to re-mount the drive and repeat the attempt to copy the file. I can imagine writing a script for this myself in bash or python, but was wondering if there's already a utility out there which tries really hard to copy things!

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First, why is it un-mounting itself? I've seen filesystems with errors get remounted as read-only before... is it a filesystem error, or does the hard drive actually power itself down or "reset"? Look in your logs and check (/var/log/syslog or dmesg should help).

If it's a filesystem error, then mounting it as read-only (mount -o ro ...) should keep it mounted, since you won't be writing anything to it. Fixing the filesystem errors might fix it, with a fsck tool, or if it's NTFS it may need a windows chkdsk to fix some errors. Unless there are hardware errors....

If there are hardware errors causing it to be un-mounted, then it's possible your drive is failing, and repeatedly mounting it read-write (rw) could be making it worse, possibly overwriting the data you want to save. Then data recovery could be needed, like gddrescue (GNU ddrescue) to image what you can read from the drive, then work on the image, with testdisk tools.

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  • I think the drive is losing power and restarting. Some sort of electrical problem, I imagine. The data's not critical, but it'd be nice to have. Was hoping not to have to go into full-on data recovery mode. It's FAT32. Mounting ro is wise, forgot to do that, thanks.
    – foobarbecue
    Jan 19, 2015 at 3:42
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    External drives can be tricky, if you've got a desktop (or a laptop & live dvd/usb even) you could take the drive out of the enclosure & plug it in directly, might work better? And no worries about USB problems (often causes headaches & mysterious errors for me)
    – Xen2050
    Jan 19, 2015 at 5:37
  • Yeah... I'd been thinking about that too. Not to hard to scrounge an old desktop from somewhere I guess.
    – foobarbecue
    Jan 19, 2015 at 7:41

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