Serious problems with USB HDD, Syslog-ng and Samba.

[pjesi]

I have this weird problem.

I converted my old HP Omnibook xe3 (crap I know) into a router/gw without any problems and it had been up for about a month. But then I decided to plug my 200WD USB HDD into it and share it with Samba. That just worked awesome for a few weeks until I unplugged the HDD and took it with me to a lanparty. When I came back and plug the disk back to the router it seemed to work fine until the next day some mysterious things started to occur.

#1. I lost connection to the partitions on the disk and was unable to umount them. It also posted a lot of errors to the console.

#2. All messages that usually go to /var/log/messages started to appear on the console. And the messages file had disappeared.

#3. The system refused to reboot or shutdown. I had to manually unplug the power and the battery to restart.

SSH'ing to the machine worked fine and it was running everything else without problems.

After the manual reboot the system worked fine and I was able to mount the HDD and get everything back to what it was before the malfunction.
But that lasted only for about one day. Now this has happened for the 3rd time and it is getting a little bit too annoying.

I'm running 2.6.9-gentoo-r1 kernel.

[pjesi]

Just upgraded to 2.6.9-r6 last night and I think i could have solved it.