External USB hard drive "loosing" connection [Maxtor onetouch]

[Linda Hanigan]

On Wed, 2008-03-12 at 18:31 +1100, Owen Townend wrote:
> 
> 
> On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 5:48 PM, Fajar Priyanto <fajarpri at cbn.net.id>
> wrote:
>         On Wednesday 12 March 2008 11:47:33 Hemant Bist wrote:
>         > Hi,
>         > I recently bought a Maxtor onetouch extenal USB drive 500GB
>         for backup for
>         > my ubuntu dapper system.
>         > Every morning the backup script fails because it has problem
>         in accessing
>         > the drive. Once I manually remount(sudo umount /dev/sda1;
>         sudo mount
>         > /dev/sda1) the drive and restart backup it works fine.
>         > Has anyone seen this problem before? Any workarounds for
>         this?
>         
>         
>         Maybe the auto-sleep disconnect the drive? Is there any
>         related messages
>         in /var/log/syslog?
>         
>         As a work around you can set a crontab to prevent the drive
>         from sleeping,
>         maybe a 'ls -l /var/backup' for every 10 minutes.
> Hey,
> 
> I agree it sounds like a sleep issue, but this solution seems like
> overkill, 
> if this is the only time it is an issue why not add the remount to the
> start 
> of the backup script?
> You _may_ be able to run `sudo mount -o remount /dev/sda1` instead of 
> the two separate commands.
> If you don't want to have to enter a sudo password and also don't want
> to 
> give blanket nopasswd access to mount then write your remounts in a
> script,
> chown root; chmod 744; then add permissions for the script to you
> sudoers.
> 
> cheers,
> Owen.
> 
> 

I had this problem with the external drive I use for backup. I found if
it was mounted with automount it would unmount after a certain amount of
time. I tried mounting it from the command line and it stayed mounted. I
did have trouble with my external hard drive over heating so I put a
small fan on it and have not had any further trouble.
                            Good Luck
                               Linda