Right, I just finished doing some tests. Via NFS and FTP, to the
external disc, the same thing happens. The copy runs fine (I was
copying a 3.9GB ISO) for a random amount of time - shortest now was
300MB, longest was just under 3GB - and then the disc seem to get
unplugged.
Then, I repeated the tests, with samba, NFS and ftp, copying the same
ISO to my home directory on the notebook, and this worked without a
problem.
I copied the file from the notebook's drive to the external drive - no
problem.
Then I tried the following. I ftp-ed to localhost, and did a "put
file.iso" to the external drive. This worked 100% I did similar tests
with nfs and smb, connecting to localhost and copying the file via the
smb/nfs clients - al worked fine.
I also did at least one failed and one successful each using the
notebook's wireless instead of wired network, to rule out network
hardware, and repeated all the tests from my second notebook (which runs
Debian too).
So it's just a mix of network and network copy that seems to cause
problems.
I hope that's better :-) Any ideas?