Ubuntu fstab drive not mounting with read/write

[woollypigs]

I have this in my fstab

/dev/sda3 /media/sda3 vfat iocharset=utf8,umask=000  0 0

When I boot up I do not have read/write access to the drive, but when I unmount it, sudo umount /dev/sda3, and then mount it again with sudo mount -a, I have read/write.

What is wrong here ?

[Greenbank]

Anything in dmesg?

dmesg | grep sda3

[woollypigs]

the drive is mounted with read/write and was coping files over when I did that command

[    4.069154]  sda: sda1 sda2 < sda5 > sda3
[  229.720685] FAT: Filesystem panic (dev sda3)
[  229.720709] FAT: Filesystem panic (dev sda3)
[  229.720757] FAT: Filesystem panic (dev sda3)
[  229.720772] FAT: Filesystem panic (dev sda3)
[  229.721131] FAT: Filesystem panic (dev sda3)
[  229.721287] FAT: Filesystem panic (dev sda3)
[  229.721597] FAT: Filesystem panic (dev sda3)
[  229.721619] FAT: Filesystem panic (dev sda3)
[  229.721650] FAT: Filesystem panic (dev sda3)
[  229.721672] FAT: Filesystem panic (dev sda3)
[  229.721703] FAT: Filesystem panic (dev sda3)
[SNIP]
[  229.721992] FAT: Filesystem panic (dev sda3)
[  229.722028] FAT: Filesystem panic (dev sda3)
[  229.722055] FAT: Filesystem panic (dev sda3)
[  229.722131] FAT: Filesystem panic (dev sda3)

[rae]

If it thinks it is read-only (regardless of how you mounted it) then it will spew that stuff all over the place.   You should see the stuff you can get it to spew when you have a storage platform that do read-only without telling the box. 

I'd guess the answer is an fsck, (fsck.msdos?), but I'd first copy the data off it, if it is still there. 

Why are you running FAT under Linux?  Is this drive also used in a win32 environment?   Might be better to chkdsk it in that environment if that is possible.

[woollypigs]

It is FAT so that I can see it from virtualbox (running XP) and not have any problems while on networks with only windows machines so there is no issues copying files to and from.

[rae]

Does XP have a problem with the drive, and is the data there?

[woollypigs]

No problem when the drive is mounted with read/write and yes there is quite a ok of files there.

[rae]

I'd copy the data off and fsck.   Read the man page first....

[mercury]

FAT filesystem panic on partition sda3, oh dear. Sounds like bad media or bad filesystem.

To check the media, do a read-only test on the entire drive:
# badblocks -v -c 1024 /dev/sda

To check the FAT filesystem in the third partition:
# fsck.vfat -v /dev/sda3

Try adding the read-write mount option to fstab:
/dev/sda3 /media/sda3 vfat rw,iocharset=utf8,umask=000  0 0