Problem with hard drive lock out

[marklapier at aol.com]

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??

Mark LaPierre

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