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

Question

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?

Here's a sample of what I'm dealing with:

root@zodiac:/mnt/mybook# mount | grep mybook
//192.168.1.4/PUBLIC on /mnt/mybook type cifs (rw,mand)

root@zodiac:/mnt/mybook# ls -lh entries 
-r-xr--r-- 1 www-data www-data 1.2K 2008-03-26 21:29 entries

root@zodiac:/mnt/mybook# file entries 
entries: ASCII text

root@zodiac:/mnt/mybook# head -n5 entries 
8

dir
1
file:///home/svn/gt_data

root@zodiac:/mnt/mybook# stat entries 
  File: `entries'
  Size: 1201        Blocks: 8          IO Block: 16384  regular file
Device: 18h/24d Inode: 2149510     Links: 1
Access: (0544/-r-xr--r--)  Uid: (   33/www-data)   Gid: (   33/www-data)
Access: 2008-03-26 21:29:34.000000000 -0700
Modify: 2008-03-26 21:29:34.000000000 -0700
Change: 2010-01-09 08:59:06.000000000 -0800

root@zodiac:/mnt/mybook# rm entries 
rm: cannot remove `entries': No such file or directory

root@zodiac:/mnt/mybook# cat > entries 
-su: entries: No such file or directory

root@zodiac:/mnt/mybook# lsattr entries
lsattr: Inappropriate ioctl for device While reading flags on entries

@Tobu,

root@zodiac:/mnt/mybook# grep mybook /proc/self/mountinfo
33 18 0:24 / /mnt/mybook rw - cifs //192.168.1.4/PUBLIC rw,mand,unc=\\192.168.1.4\PUBLIC,username=root,posixpaths,acl,rsize=16384,wsize=57344

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

Looks like a server configuration error. The fact that the share name is PUBLIC is a red flag. I wouldn't necessarily expect a PUBLIC share to be writable.