Why can't certain files on my external drive be deleted with Unix utilities?

Why can't certain files on my external drive be deleted with Unix utilities?

I have an external drive (WD My Book World) mounted on my Ubuntu system which I've used for backups over the last few years. Some of the backups included SVN repositories which now include files which I can't appear to delete. I can mv them and view their contents, but that seems to be it. My question is: how can I remove these files from this external drive?

Asked by: Guest | Views: 368

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Guest [Entry]

The errors indicate that the file system is corrupted. This might be from not unpluggingn the disk correctly, or it might be defective. You need to run a file system checker (fsck) on the partition or reformat it and see if it is reliable after that.