LinuxQuestions.org - USB HD dies in Slackware 9.1

Hi guys, I'm wondering if someone could please shed some light on this issue. I recently bought an 80GB portable USB1.1/2.0 HD. It currently has the following partitions:
/dev/sda1 -- ext3 -- 47.5 GiB
/dev/sda2 -- FAT32 -- 27.5 GiB

I'm running Slackware 9.1 and have compiled the kernel (2.4.22) to have built-in USB2.0 and USB storage support (not using modules). I have disabled hotplug since I've found it segfaulting a lot.

The partitions show up with [fdisk -l]. After I mount them with:
[mount -t ext3 /dev/sda1 /mnt/pub]
and
[mount -t vfat /dev/sda2 /mnt/winxp],

I can properly see the files on the FAT32 partition. However, when I try to copy some audio files (could it be a problem with naming? there are spaces in the audio files' filenames) from the FAT32 partition to the ext3 partition, the terminal freezes (both Ctrl-C and Ctrl-Z have no effect).

Eventually it says that it can't read from a sector or inode or something like that (the drive is nearly brand new so I doubt that). The light on the drive goes red, the drive "dies" and the partitions disappear from [fdisk -l].

I'm wondering if I'm doing something horribly and obviously wrong :/ Please help, I'd rather not have to return the drive because I can't get it to work properly... thanks a lot in advance!