Bob Parks writes
I really don't think it is the physical disk. Try ls a* -l and if that produces the bus error, try ls -l in another directory small directory in on the same partition of the disk.
and what will this show? As long as we don't know the causee, surly we won't bin it, but we can't operate with somethnig that flaky, whatever does the flakes there. My recomondation: clone the current root disk onto the large disk asd try to boot with that, keeping the existing disk in the box. Note that tihs box also has USB1 that's why it took Tim so much time to back it up. Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel phone: +7 383 330 6813 skype: thomaskrichel