My external SSD has also become a brick. My Acer travelmate 2450 has an IDE harddrive which I decided to replace with an external usb Kingston SSD drive. I cloned the IDE drive to the new SSD. I decided to remove the native IDE drive since I could not get into the BIOS to change the boot sequence to USB first. Started up the computer with only the usb drive attached and it worked beautifully for a week since I always plugged the drive into the same USB bus. Footnote: I'm still on Jaunty, Karmic would not boot up for me.

Then I moved the drive to a different usb bus before startup and the system does not boot up anymore, even when attached to the original usb bus. Says "operating system not found". Popped in a live cd, but can't mount the SSD drive. Booted up with the old IDE drive and still can't mount the SSD drive. I also can not see it with fdisk -l.

The output of dmesg:

[ 1216.260881] end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 24
[ 1216.260930] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Result: hostbyte=DID_ERROR driverbyte=DRIVER_OK,SUGGEST_OK
[ 1216.260935] end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 0
[ 1216.260983] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Result: hostbyte=DID_ERROR driverbyte=DRIVER_OK,SUGGEST_OK
[ 1216.260988] end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 0
[ 1216.260995]  unable to read partition table
[ 1216.262595] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI disk
[ 1216.262695] sd 3:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
[ 1223.884102] usb 1-1: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 4
[ 1224.049713] usb 1-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[ 1224.050103] scsi4 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
[ 1224.050625] usb-storage: device found at 4
[ 1224.050628] usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning

After settling, dmesg says:
[ 1705.545548] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Add. Sense: No additional sense information
[ 1705.550804] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Sense Key : No Sense [current] 
[ 1705.550810] Info fld=0x0

lsusb gives:
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 13fd:1840 Initio Corporation 
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub

ls -lrt /dev/disk/by-id:

total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 2010-03-28 16:04 ata-HTS541060G9AT00_MP27MBXDG62DYH -> ../../sda
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2010-03-28 16:04 ata-HTS541060G9AT00_MP27MBXDG62DYH-part2 -> ../../sda2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2010-03-28 16:04 ata-HTS541060G9AT00_MP27MBXDG62DYH-part1 -> ../../sda1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2010-03-28 16:04 ata-HTS541060G9AT00_MP27MBXDG62DYH-part5 -> ../../sda5
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2010-03-28 16:04 ata-HTS541060G9AT00_MP27MBXDG62DYH-part6 -> ../../sda6
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 2010-03-28 16:05 scsi-SATA_HTS541060G9AT00_MP27MBXDG62DYH -> ../../sda
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2010-03-28 16:05 scsi-SATA_HTS541060G9AT00_MP27MBXDG62DYH-part2 -> ../../sda2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2010-03-28 16:05 scsi-SATA_HTS541060G9AT00_MP27MBXDG62DYH-part1 -> ../../sda1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2010-03-28 16:05 scsi-SATA_HTS541060G9AT00_MP27MBXDG62DYH-part5 -> ../../sda5
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2010-03-28 16:05 scsi-SATA_HTS541060G9AT00_MP27MBXDG62DYH-part6 -> ../../sda6

When doing ls -lrt /dev/disk/by-path:
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 2010-03-28 16:04 pci-0000:00:14.1-scsi-0:0:0:0 -> ../../sda
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 2010-03-28 16:04 pci-0000:00:14.1-scsi-0:0:1:0 -> ../../sr0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2010-03-28 16:04 pci-0000:00:14.1-scsi-0:0:0:0-part2 -> ../../sda2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2010-03-28 16:04 pci-0000:00:14.1-scsi-0:0:0:0-part1 -> ../../sda1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2010-03-28 16:04 pci-0000:00:14.1-scsi-0:0:0:0-part5 -> ../../sda5
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2010-03-28 16:04 pci-0000:00:14.1-scsi-0:0:0:0-part6 -> ../../sda6

When doing ls -lrt /dev/disk/by-uuid:
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2010-03-28 16:04 ad821843-7d63-44d5-91f9-7a125ac7d2db -> ../../sda1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2010-03-28 16:04 c51a9408-3052-45ed-b086-0b844a6b9cb3 -> ../../sda5
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2010-03-28 16:04 f93cd169-9fe1-42aa-ae4b-be9888f92b7d -> ../../sda6