[RESPONDED] 1TB expansion card disconnects randomly

[Matt_Hartley]

@Michael_Scot_Shappe

It ought to be a perfectly fine boot drive, honestly…except that the USB is not reliable!

This one of the reasons I prefer to use it for data storage.

@Michael_Scot_Shappe

I need an external boot drive. There are reasons, and I don’t need to go into them. It’s a requirement for something I’m doing.

Now, I can just get an actual USB external drive–there are some high-quality portable SSDs in the world, now, that would probably serve adequately.

But if the USB is not going to be reliable, then that’s not a solution either.

I hear that, I actually have had use case scenarios where I was in the same boat. There are things we can try, but it’s purely as is in terms of running an OS off it.

@Michael_Scot_Shappe

I would also point out that the advertising copy for the module in the marketplace explicitly says that it is usable as a boot drive.

This needs to be corrected as with Windows, it’s not officially supported: Windows 11 Won't Reboot but can Shutdown - #7 by TheTwistgibber

It’s doable for Linux, but it’s best seen as your mileage may vary.

All of that said, your errors appear to be bad sectors and we can attack this way:

• Understand that if you don’t have any data backed up from this drive, now is the time because there is always risk of data loss. Live USB, secondary USB storage device, backup Home.

• sudo umount /dev/sdb then sudo fsck -y /dev/sdb1 (or 2 or whichever is applicable) (To check for and -y to correct errors).

This process will be slow, very slow.

Faster approach:

• Boot to live USB, gparted, create a brand new partition on the device.

• Reinstall fresh (although I am not a fan of trusting USB to be flawless for OS usage).