From: Michael Havens 
> bmike1@PresarioLapTop1:~/Desktop$ ls -la /mnt/backup
> ls: reading directory /mnt/backup: Input/output error

This is not a good sign.  ls should never return "I/O error"; that usually
means either filesystem problems or hardware problems.  After you see
something like that, you should always do "dmesg | tail -n 30" and see if
anything in the output from dmesg has anything like "sdX: unrecoverable error
reading sector 131072".

> cp: cannot create regular file `/mnt/backup/Backup bmike1':
> Permission denied
> I think this means I need to change the ownership of /mnt/backup 

Not really.  As root, you need to create a dir in /mnt/backup/ which is owned
by your user.

> bmike1@PresarioLapTop1:~/Desktop$ ls -l /mnt
> drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Jul  5 19:06 backup
> drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Jul  5 19:06 sdc

When you mount a filesystem on a dir, the mountpoint may or may not change
ownership.  Take a look:

workstation:~$ ls -l /mnt
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 May  9 15:37 bigred
workstation:~$ mount /mnt/bigred
workstation:~$ ls -l /mnt
drwxrwxrwx 8 mhgraham mhgraham 4096 Dec 31  1969 bigred

...bigred is a FAT32 filesystem on a USB device.  FAT32 doesn't have
permissions, so they're faked at mount time with a umask of 000 and ownership
of me.  If this were an ext3 device, the / of the device would be owned by
root:root by default.

> bmike1@PresarioLapTop1:~/Desktop$ sudo chown bmike1 /mnt/backup
> chown: changing ownership of `/mnt/backup': Input/output error

Are you sure this disk is OK?

> rsync: mkdir "/mnt/backup/bmike1" failed: Read-only file system (30)

Check the output of dmesg and see what's going on.

> drwxr-xr-x 4 bmike1 root 4096 Jul  5 19:06 backup
> Is this looking as it should? What does the 4th place mean (the place that
> says 'root').

ls -l output is:  1 char for filetype, 9 chars for permissions
(user,group,other), link count (the number of things that are in a directory,
or 1 for non-directories that don't have hard links), user who owns the file,
group who owns the file, size of the file, date, filename.

-- 
Matt G / Dances With Crows
The Crow202 Blog:  http://crow202.org/wordpress/
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see

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