Ext4: I/O errors on a clean external drive

Question

So I've an external Seagate hard disk that I used to mount on my Mac through Paragon ExtFS.

For some unknown reason it stopped to mount on my Mac due to I/O errors - I may have removed the drive without dismounting.

Okay. I tried to mount this drive on the Ubuntu machine I use on my work, and it mounted. I found some bizarre permission errors here and there, but most of them were resolved after executing the fsck and chown/chgrp commands.

I now have only two directories with I/O issues, although fsck says my drive is clean. Although I can list their contents with ls/find commands, I can't stat anything inside them. Using debugfs on those "hidden" files I was able to see that they've uid=501 and gid=20.

My question: is there any way/tool to fix these files permissions? Using fsck wasn't enough to fix them.

Answer 1

You might consider using debugfs(8) but if you care for your data you'll better use that on some disk image, not on the partition itself.