Problems with External Hard Drive - kernel: journal commit I/O error

Question

I'm having issues keeping a 3TB USB 2.0 External Hard drive (self powered) mounted on my pi.

I'm using a 1.0 A wall charger to power the pi. I'm connecting the hard drive to a powered Belkin USB hub and then plugging that hub into a USB port on the pi.

Purchased the hard drive new and reformatted to ext3 using the pi.

The hard drive connects and mounts fine both manually using mount [device] [dir] and automagically using usbmount, and works fine for as long as im active on the device/drive. I'll come back to the pi a few hours or a day later and try and access the drive at the mount point and can't access the drive at the same (/dev/sda1) location. When I try to ls on the mount point, I get: ls: reading directory /media/usb0: Input/output error and this accross any connected sessions:

Message from syslogd@raspberrypi at Nov 16 10:46:40 ...
 kernel:[32781.214102] journal commit I/O error

Message from syslogd@raspberrypi at Nov 16 10:46:40 ...
 kernel:[32781.226121] journal commit I/O error

I then have to remount the drive. sometimes I'll notice the device path has changed from /dev/sda1 to /dev/sdb1. Sometimes I even need to un/re-plug the drive into the pi.

I'm now trying to figure out if this is a power issue (which im skeptical of), a disk issue (like the disk going into sleep mode or something) or a kernal/linux issue. Any one have any ideas?

UPDATE

/var/log/messages: http://bit.ly/TYDYZR

Answer 1

I am having the same exact problem. The way i solved (worked-around) this issue is:

1. i created a startup script named /etc/init.d/mountmedia that looks like the code below (more details read here http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/28 )

!/bin/sh

# /etc/init.d/mountmedia
#

# Carry out specific functions when asked to by the system
case "$1" in
  start)
    echo "Mounting external drive... "
    mount /dev/sd*1 /media/data
    ;;
  stop)
    echo "Un-mounting external drive..."
    umount /media/data
    ;;
  *)    
    echo "Usage: /etc/init.d/mountmedia {start|stop}"
    exit 1
    ;;
esac
exit 0

1. then i created a cronjob to check if the mount is down, and remount it if necessary. Here's my script

!/bin/sh

filenumber=`ls /media/data/ | wc -l`
if [ "$filenumber" -lt 1 ]; then
    echo "mounting ..."
    sudo umount /media/data
    sudo mount /dev/sd*1 /media/data
fi

Answer 2

i'm having the same issue. But i'm using a power supplied hdd. Did you have any luck on solving this issue?