Problem with hard drive lock out

[Mark LaPierre]

Hey All,

I'm having a vexing problem with FC8 losing connection to one of my hard 
drives.  I've had it drop out in a matter of a few minutes.  This time 
it was working for several days before it quit.

I have two drives on my system.  One SATA drive has the system installed 
on it.  The other, plugged into the IDE header has data files on it.  
The SATA drive runs fine.  The IDE drive will eventually quit working.  
I can cd onto the drive as long as I don't try to access something that 
is not already in the disk cache.  When I try to access the drive I get 
this error:

[mlapier at mushroom mlapier]$ cd /sdb1
[mlapier at mushroom sdb1]$ cd mlapier
[mlapier at mushroom mlapier]$ cd mail
[mlapier at mushroom mail]$ cd MYDIR
[mlapier at mushroom MYDIR]$ ls
ls: reading directory .: Input/output error
[mlapier at mushroom piano]$ cd /sdb2
[mlapier at mushroom sdb2]$ cd piano
[mlapier at mushroom piano]$ ls
ls: reading directory .: Input/output error

There are two partitions mounted thus:

drwxrwxrwx  16 root users  4096 2007-12-29 12:56 sdb1
drwxrwxrwx  49 root users  4096 2008-01-06 22:48 sdb2

[mlapier at mushroom etc]$ cat fstab
/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 /                       ext3    defaults        1 1
LABEL=/boot             /boot                   ext3    defaults        1 2
tmpfs                   /dev/shm                tmpfs   defaults        0 0
/dev/sdb1               /sdb1                   ext2    defaults        1 2
/dev/sdb2               /sdb2                   ext2    defaults        1 2
devpts                  /dev/pts                devpts  gid=5,mode=620  0 0
sysfs                   /sys                    sysfs   defaults        0 0
proc                    /proc                   proc    defaults        0 0
/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01 swap                    swap    defaults        0 0

[mlapier at mushroom etc]$ uname -a
Linux mushroom.patch 2.6.23.15-137.fc8 #1 SMP Sun Feb 10 17:03:13 EST 
2008 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

I've been running Linux for many years on many boxes but I've never 
encountered a situation like this.  The only way I've found to restore 
operation is a to reboot.

Anyone got any clues??