Hi all,
I'm actually not a Linux newbie, but I'm DEFINITELY no expert either... I'm trying to copy all my data(approx 50 GB) from a usb drive(western digital 250GB) with ntfs partition in one go...
The problem is that it only fails for big transfers... works fine for smaller transfers like 1Gigs or less...
I have just one internal hdd partitioned into two ext3 partitions..
so I have sda1(Primary.. mount pt /), sda2(swap) and sda3(mount pt /piyush)...
The usb drive comes up as sdb(sdb1).. just has one ntfs partition...
I've also installed the ntf-3g drivers.... but doesn't seem to work...
I've also noticed that when the machine hangs and I try to shut down, it fails and I get a message again again... (sdb1- no sense detected) or something like this... don't remember the exact message... will post the exact one if no one is able to figure out what's wrong...

Post the errors on the file transfers as well. Are there any syslog messages regarding the drive (SMART?) or failure?

If the drive is failing, perhaps you could attempt to 'dd' the data off the drive in chunks, join them together and them mount the file to recover your 50 gigs.

@above : thanks for the guidance dude...

ok so this is the message I get when I try and "poweroff" my machine...
The screen fills up with this message and the system never shuts down..
If I just remove my disk it shuts down...

This look familiar?

http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/li.../10/22/3769274

check your kernel version? perhaps it's a bug?

I think you're correct..
This is very similar to what I'm facing
Moreover my kernel version is 2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686...
Thanks for all the time..