why k4dirstat or DiskUsageAnalyzer, when run at root (/), will end up making that FS readonly?
Then I have to reboot and run fsck manually after that :(.
Is there any alternative app to them that wont cause that?
do you know what directory when accessed could cause that problem?
Some more info:
I found something about SMART logs:
sda sdb and sdc, all have entries at syslog like "SMART Prefailure/Usage Attribute:" about changes in "Temperature_Celsius", "Airflow_Temperature_Cel",
but only sdc had this tho "Hardware_ECC_Recovered".
k4dirstat was run at root '/' and it is at sdb (but it has a LVM mirror leg at sda).
I am not sure sdc stuff was mounted at /media when I ran k4dirstat.
may be, next time I try to run it just after a fresh boot with minimal apps running, and making sure only root '/' is mounted, I should run it again on a terminal in verbose mode to try to catch something...
61 Answer
From the comments...
Syslog and SMART report similar errors...
syslog's sda [SAT], 43 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors matches SMART's "Current Pending Sector Count"=43
Potential bad sectors only get marked unusable during a WRITE operation, not READ. That's probably why k4dirstat and Disk Usage Analyzer caused the drive to go read only.
Possible failing sda HDD.
Update #1:
After performing a good backup, lets check for bad blocks and see if we can map them out... maybe you'll get a little more time with this disk... if there aren't too many bad blocks.
Boot to a Ubuntu Live DVD/USB, open the terminal app, and use the:
sudo e2fsck -fcck /dev/sdaX # yes, that's -fcck
command, where sdaX needs to be your Ubuntu partition.
The -fcck parameter...
-f Force checking even if the file system seems clean. -c This option causes e2fsck to use badblocks(8) program to do a read-only scan of the device in order to find any bad blocks. If any bad blocks are found, they are added to the bad block inode to prevent them from being allocated to a file or direc‐ tory. If this option is specified twice, then the bad block scan will be done using a non-destructive read-write test. -k When combined with the -c option, any existing bad blocks in the bad blocks list are preserved, and any new bad blocks found by running badblocks(8) will be added to the existing bad blocks list.
