[Bug-ddrescue] Logfile won't write: claims drive is read-only

[Jeffrey Carlson]

Hi,

I'm not sure if this is a bug, but no one I normally ask these questions
seems to know what's going on with an error message I'm getting that I
can't write a logfile. I hope this isn't an inappropriate forum and
apologize if it is, but I would really like to not lose this backup. (I
already had to abandon an earlier ddrescue attempt that had made almost 130
MB more progress than this one has, so I know the drive is failing more as
I try to recover data.)

I'm in the midst of trying to use ddrescue 1.17 to copy a HFS+ partition
from a failing hard drive in an enclosure, and attached to a Ubuntu laptop
as an external hard drive, to a ext4 partition on a different external hard
drive. The cords must have gotten bumped: I was told there was an
input/output error, and I don't seem to be able to write the new version to
the logfile. I have two questions, one about whether I should be worried
about this at all and the second about the error message I can't understand.

Question 1: in Section 7 of the manual, it says my logfile will be lost if
I hit Q+ENTER to quit. Will this make me unable to resume the backup in the
future? I have saved copies of the logfile up to this point in other
locations in case it will let me resume.

In case I really shouldn't do Q+enter, I'll describe the error(s). I
initially had this:

ddrescue: Error opening logfile 'baby3.logfile' for writing.: Input/output
error

So I made sure the drive was plugged in and mounted, and got a new error:

ddrescue: Error opening logfile 'baby3.logfile' for writing.: Read-only
file system
Fix the problem and press ENTER to retry, or Q+ENTER to abort.

I've done various things to try and fix this. The drive I was writing to
was indeed mounted as read-only, so I unmounted it and remounted it as
rewriteable. That didn't work, so physically ejected it and plugged it back
in, and it told me it was now rewriteable. I tested that I could create and
delete files on it, so I believe this is correct. I changed myself to owner
on all files on the partition and changed all permissions to 777. It also
seemed I was running up against a space issue, in that there wasn't enough
space to write the logfile, but I used tune2fs to shrink the root-reserved
portion and checked there was then enough space to copy the logfile several
times (properties reports it has 2.4GB free), so it no longer seems like
that could be the issue either. No matter what I try, though, I get the
"read-only file system" error message.

Question 2: what can I do to make ddrescue want to write the logfile to
this drive?


Thank for reading this,
Jeff

P.S.: In case it's of interest, here's what my progress looked like before
the problem:

GNU ddrescue 1.17
Press Ctrl-C to interrupt
Initial status (read from logfile)
rescued:   497982 MB,  errsize:   1131 MB,  errors:    3727
Current status
rescued:   497984 MB,  errsize:   1129 MB,  current rate:        0 B/s
   ipos:    15227 MB,   errors:    3917,    average rate:      136 B/s
   opos:    15227 MB,    time since last successful read:     1.2 m
Splitting failed blocks...