I have a storage device (sda) where I stored some backups in its partition 1 (sda1). Disgracefully, I killed the process (rsync) that was backing up data into the mounted storage device and, I guess, creating a fault in the drive.
Now I am trying to undo the mess by removing all files from the backup dir. I can successfully remove most of the files and directories I backed up before the crash, although many don’t want to be deleted and show Directory not empty or Input/output error. I guess these files are the ones that couldn’t fully be copied into the backup directory because of me killing the rsync process.
Since I am using a server OS I can’t use a GUI to throw these files into the paper bin and then flush it (as I’ve seen other people do with similar issues).

This is what I’ve tried for now:

• umount the drive and fsck -f in /dev/sda1
• smartctl -a /dev/sda1 which gave me the usual information, no errors in it.
• Removing parent directories -> I get Directory not empty

More information:

In some cases I can’t even ls:

/hooks$ ls -lha
ls: cannot access 'applypatch-msg.sample': Input/output error
ls: cannot access 'pre-receive.sample': Input/output error
total 8.0K
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4.0K Jun 13 11:37 .
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4.0K Jun 13 11:37 ..
-????????? ? ?    ?       ?            ? applypatch-msg.sample
-????????? ? ?    ?       ?            ? pre-receive.sample

These files are not important, it would be ideal if I could just remove them. The storage doesn’t have important information either, I am just using it for testing purposes for now, so resetting it wouldn’t be a problem, although I’d like to find a more elegant solution. Thank you!