Mounting of external drive going weird

[dandellion]

I have a few days old installation of Maya, and it's all quite nice and well except that external hard drive that tends to unmount itself on its own in the middle of the work.
So I sat tonight to do something about it, checked if filesystems are clean, checked for errors... you know, the usual drill. Everything's fine, so I opened fstab. It looked normal so I commented out the lines with partitions of that drive (three ext4 and one ntfs), disconnected the cable and rebooted. At that moment fstab looks like this:

Code: Select all

proc            /proc           proc    nodev,noexec,nosuid 0       0
UUID=c6697963-81ea-4639-b98b-a2ae562a15f9 /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1
UUID=C2F4CF21F4CF1717 /blue           ntfs    defaults,umask=007,gid=46 0       0
UUID=cae0bad3-36f7-4757-98a6-3eda88ba8b26 /home           ext4    defaults        0       2
#UUID=cea5869d-e638-4a39-bf0a-9ab85822e0f1 /morpheus       ext4    defaults        0       2
#UUID=fada2ae7-0ef7-4c11-8a23-1f48ad95d003 /neo            ext4    defaults        0       2
#UUID=2FFA4830081D42E9 /smith          ntfs    defaults,umask=007,gid=46 0       0
#UUID=babb0a15-c29b-44bc-b61c-45e7e1f56f5d /trinity        ext4    defaults        0       2
UUID=d93edede-abb8-4349-bfd6-9ada439326a7 none            swap    sw              0       0

After reboot and login, I plug the cable back in and all four partitions automatically mount in /media and icons show on desktop (XFCE if that's of any matter). Several seconds later, they unmount. Then mount again. And again... and again.... So I unplug the cable from the disk, but the thing goes on. for quite a while, mounting and umounting the partitions, even if there is no disk connected to the system anymore.

Any help?

[billmc]

To me, this sounds like a mechanical connection problem. I suspect that some type of vibration is causeing a make/break situation so fast, that the system can not display it fast enough; therefore it contiunes to process and display even after you've unplugged the device. This can be anything from a cold solder joint to a broken wire, from the solder connection on the mother board all the way through to the solder connection inside the drive.

If this is the only device that has this problem, you can eliminate the box. I really suspect the connector on the outside of the disk carrier. I'd start with trying a different USB cable. If that doesn't solve the problem, next would be to move the drive into a different carrier. If it still happens, then the problem is internal to the drive and I'd reccomend backing up the drive as soon as and as best you can.