External disk problem.

[ny6p01 at gmail.com]

On Sun, Jul 29, 2012 at 09:59:56AM +0200, Erik P. Olsen wrote:
> I have an external 1 TB harddisk e-sata attached used for backups.
> The problem is that I have  few times lost connection to it. I have
> taken up the habit of suspending (to RAM) when I leave the machine
> for a while and the problem seems to happen when I reactivate the
> system though not every time. After a power cycle the disk attaches
> correctly again. There is no trace of the problem in the various
> logs so I am tempted to believe that it is caused by the suspend
> process rather than a disk failure but since it is my backup device
> I would like to be sure.
> 
> System: Fedora 16 with xfce 4.10
> Kernel:  3.4.6-1.fc16.x86_64
> 
> Question: How can I run diagnose on the disk to see if it is about
> to fail permanently?

That's not a disk problem. That's the disk failing to remount itself
properly after the suspend. This is very common. In fact, I wrote a script
(in Gentoo) to unmount external drives before a suspend operation, so that
the numbering of disks in /dev don't become littered with 'zombie' drives.

I'm sure there's a super-slick way of getting drives to remount themselves
after a suspend, but mounting drives is relatively easy to do either with
gui or cli tools, so I don't tear my hair over it.

Terry