Answers

Q Scary errors

I’ve got an annoying problem where my external hard drive accidentally disconnected as I was copying files to it. The drive is in NTFS format so that my Windows machines can also read/write to it. My system is Manjaro Linux with kernel 4.19.

After reconnecting the drive, I wanted to delete those files and start from scratch. However, after running rm -rf on the directory in question, it threw several errors on some files in that directory. They look like this:

This is annoying. Is there a way to fix this without having to re-format the entire partition?

Callum Curtis

Input/output errors on files can be scary as they often point to a hardware problem, but they can also be a symptom of filesystem corruption. As this happened after a write operation was interrupted, filesystem corruption is the most likely cause. You will probably also find that running ls -l on the drive’s mount point produces lots of spurious characters or question marks in the output. If this were a Linux filesystem, I would recommend running on it. There is a Linux program to deal with some NTFS problems called , part of the package and which is almost certainly already installed on your system if you are using NTFS. This is not a full equivalent for NTFS – the best program for that is Windows’ . However, running will cause Windows to check the disk the next time it sees it. First run