Adam Borowski <kilobyte@???> wrote:

> You can't mount ext4 as ext2 because of extents and a bunch of other
> features.

I found that out this morning ;-) I'd forgotten that I'd used ETX4 on this drive - I'm one of those "why change if it aint broke" people still using EXT3.

> To disable journal recovery mount with -oro,norecovery, very recently a
> bunch of filesystems either gained this option or aliased their existing
> options (like nologreplay) to that.

I've just tried "-o ro,noatime,nodiratime,norecovery" and will see if it makes any difference.
...
The disk is no less "unhealthy", but I'm not seeing any write errors now :-)