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I have some raspberryPi2 model-B boards, using USB drives as their root filesystem. As it turned out, the USB chips I had chosen are prone to build up tremendous heat, and after 6-8 months, they started malfunctioning.

As far as I know, whenever a removable media becomes corrupted (or shows signs it's going to be), the memory controller disables all writes on the disk to prevent any further data corruption. This write-protection cannot be removed by conventional tools (needs manufacturer's special utilities which aren't public).

This happened to me a few times before, but I was able to migrate the whole system to the backup-USB (on the fly) when I discovered the problem in time. Sometimes however, I noticed the problem when it was too late, for eg. the system couldn't get up after reboot.

I need a proper method to check if the filesystem becomes corrupted/read-only (by hardware failure), so I can set up a mechanism to send notification about the problem.

I'm thinking about simply creating a test file in the temp area, and examining the command's return value, but I'm not sure it's entirely correct way to do that.

Something like this:

touch /tmp/testfile && { rm /temp/testfile; do stuff }

TL;DR; So basically, is there any failproof way to check the root filesystems' write permission/physical health, or this will be more than enough?

Gergely Lukacsy
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  • This fantasy seems to have nothing to do with the Pi. – Milliways Apr 18 '16 at 11:53
  • @Milliways I approve that the question was not too much Pi-related, but most linux boxes aren't using USB drives as their root partition, which is the case in my situation. So i tought it will be appropriate to ask this question on it's dedicated Stack community.

    Out of couriosity, what do you like to tell me when using the term "fantasy"? Please pardon me, english is not my first language.

     – Gergely Lukacsy Apr 19 '16 at 08:47
  • "whenever a removable media becomes corrupted (or shows signs it's going to be), the system disables all writes on the disk " – Milliways Apr 19 '16 at 09:04
  • @Milliways I saw a few hints here and there on Stack Exchange, and I can remember there was an answer which linked a detailed article about the topic, but I can't find that particular answer.

    Otherways, here's one comment that mentions this behaviour:

    Cannot format USB flash drive, everything claims it's write protected

     – Gergely Lukacsy Apr 19 '16 at 09:54

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