Hi,
I have two hard drives which have recently decided to become completely erroneus to the extent that often I cannot access data from them. Both drives are ext3.
Granted, one is a rather old 80Gb Samsung SP0802N that has seen a lot of action. This drive mounts fine, but after a short while of trying to access it, it just gives up - cfdisk says there are no partitions there! Smartctl lists quite a few errors for the drive - errors 38144, 38143, 38142, 38141 (if they actually mean anything!)

However the puzzling bit concerns my other HD, a recently purchased 300Gb Maxtor 6L300R0 - which is only a couple of months old, but is already racking up a load of 'kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev 16:01' errors - actually hundreds of these with varying sector numbers. Performance seems fine except after a few hours of apparent inactivity, no files are visible on the partition! Remounting doesnt solve the problem, but the files are definately still there - according to df anyway.
I'm quite worried about this as I have no means to backup the entirety of my data at the moment. Could there be any smart, hdparm or kernel issues at the root of these problems?
My kernel is 2.4.29. I have also noticed an error with insmod and pciehp in my syslog - won't load properly.
thanks.

I have no idea. You can install smartmontools to monitor SMART stuff, and you can use TestDisk if anything is wrong with your partitions. But I doubt any of this is the problem.

Disconnect the old drive. I don't know how you have this configured, but let's assume it is IDE master slave. The old drive needs to be the slave. The new drive needs to be master. Each drive has a jumper cap that you have to move around to set the drive for its position on the cable. Once you get the jumpers set correctly, attach the old drive to the middle IDE connector on the cable, and the new master drive to the end connector on the cable. Now, the 300 GB controller is controlling both drives. That is what you are telling the computer when you make one drive master and the other slave; use master's controller for both drives. When you get done with that, go get dd_rescue http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/ddrescue/

Transfer all the data off the old drive with

dd_rescue if=/dev/sdb of=/home/sam/olddrive.img

After it gets done, mount the image

mkdir /mnt/olddrive
mount -o loop /home/sam/olddrive.img /mnt/olddrive ext3 defaults 0 0
cd /mnt/olddrive
there's all the files.
I recommend this method because if there is damage to the disk at least you will have some files. See how it goes.