My use of lupu 5.2.8 for backup purposes is fatally compromised by the persistence of an Intermittent refusal to mount ntfs drives on the USB port (both USB2 and USB3 except in READ ONLY mode.
The error message is as follows:
The ntfs-3g driver was unable to mount the NTFS partion
and returned this error message:
fuse:mountpoint is not empty
fuse:if you are sure this is safe, use the "nonempty" mount option
So, the inbuilt kernel NTFS driver has been used
to mount the partition read-only
The "use" instruction is illusory, as the drive is then mounted read-only without any input from the user.
Strangely, this only happens intermittently.
For example, I just tried it with two nfts-formated drives on the USB2 port of my desktop machine, and both drives mounted with this error message. I then moved them to the USB3 port on my laptop, and one mounted normally, without an error message, and not read only, while the other mounted only read-only, after evoking the error message.
Sometimes, unplugging and replugging the USB cable makes the stricken drive writable, more often, the drive disappears and can't be mounted again without rebooting.
Just now I moved the larger read-only drive to the USB2 port, and it remainded ro. I then switched it with the smaller drive. The smaller drive then became ro, while the larger was now writable.
I moved the smaller drive back to the USB3 port, and it wasn't detected at all. Unmounted and remounted the larger drive several times on USB3 without issues, then moved it to the USB2 port again, and now it would only mount ro!
After a few more moves, neither drive was detected anymore by pmount.
Both my desktop and my laptop have internal ntfs partitions, and the laptop's is the Puppy home partition (I boot only from LiveCD, and the 2fs files are on the ntfs partition). None of the internal ntfs partitions on either PC have ever been affected by this issue.
The two affected external USB drives are both Seagates, one a 3TB USB3, the other a 320GB USB2 (which I run on either the USB3 or USB2 port via a SATA-USB3 adapter).
When I initially reported this problem, IIRC, it was suggested that it might be due to the size of the drive, or the size of the partition, but the fact that the 320GB drive is equally affected eliminates that possibility.
Another suggestion was that partitioning the 3TB with Gparted is the cause is also eliminated, because the smaller drive has never had it's file format modified from the original configuration. And the 3TB only had its 3TB partition resized down to 2TB with Gparted.
Most significantly, this error message/read-only mount problem hasn't occurred with either drive under Racy 5.2.2.