[Problem] External disk mounting unstable

[saftaplan]

Hi,
First I want to thank everyone who helped making or supporting Freetz. Both you and Freetz are great Now here's my problem:
I have a printer and an external laptop disk, attached to a powered USB hub, connected to my 7170 running Freetz stable 2.0 (I have my .config attached). The disk has two ext3 partitions and a swap file. For some time, this ran without any problems, but now all of a sudden the disk will almost never mount at boot. I have not changed anything to the configuration, I only deattached the disk, attaching it to another computer and reading some data from it, then reattaching to the router. I always unmounted before deattaching.
mod_mount.log gives:

[INFO] Mounting device /dev/sda ... 
[FAIL] Partition fb_10 (/dev/sda): Unsupported filesystem or wrong partition table (unknown)

Modules are not the problem: lsmod|grep ext gives

ext3                  106880  2 
jbd                    44704  1 ext3
ext2                   48832  0 
mbcache                 5424  2 ext3,ext2

When I try cat /dev/sda and expect garbled output, it just hangs for a while and gives "cat: read error: Input/output error" or "cat: can't open '/dev/sda': No such device or address".
The whole setup (disk and printer) mounts fine on my desktop computer. When I'm in luck, the disk does mount, but sooner or later the router will spontaneously reboot.
Attaching the disk directly to the router while still powering it externally seems to work more often, but I also want to be able to use the printer.
Changing USB hubs did seem to help for a few weeks, then the problem returned.
Is this a hardware issue? Am I asking too much of this poor old router?
Thanks in advance!

 

[koyaanisqatsi]

Welcome to the forum and hello

First: "The disk has two ext3 partitions and a swap file"
sda is the whole drive, guess the name of first partition is sda1, second sda2 and maybe swap partition is sda3.
Only if one big ext is on disk you can use sda for mounting it.

 

[saftaplan]

Thanks for the quick reply (and I'm sorry mine is late). Yes, the swap is sda1, the partition for external programs is sda2, and the 'home' partition is sda3. When the error occurs, a mount of the whole disk is automatically attempted, instead of a mount for sda1, sda2 and sda3. I think this is probably because even the partition table can't be read (even cat /dev/sda gives an error).
If I try to manually mount /dev/sda2 or /dev/sda3, I get a 'No such device or address', so the partitions are not recognized at all...
To avoid any misunderstandings: the disk itself is fine and always mounts on an ordinary computer. Sometimes it is mounted on the Freetz, but it often takes a lot of un- and replugging and is very unstable.