Strange Mounting Issue

[mosx86]

Well, I just got home and boot up my Mac Mini to discover a strange mounting issue with my secondary drive.

In a nutshell, here is my setup:

MacMini (ppc) w/ 80GB system drive.
LaCie external firewire drive (250 GB, 1 partition)

My admin account is on the system drive, but my main user account is on the LaCie. The path to my home directory is set in Netinfo as: "/Volumes/data_drive/username

Permissions on the user account are fine and I've been using this setup for quite some time with no trouble until tonight.

When I log into the computer, I get the default user setup... default aqua blue desktop, default doc, etc... I check netinfo and my home directory is still listed correctly. My data drive appears on the desktop just fine and I can access my home directory there, the OS just isn't using it.

From Finder I go to 'Go' => 'Computer' and a finder window opens only showing me Network and my System Drive. The data drive is not listed. However the data drive is on my desktop and is located in the sidebar.

If I open terminal and CD to /Volumes I get the following:

system_drive:/Volumes username$ ls -alF
total 16
drwxrwxrwt 6 root admin 204 Sep 13 22:33 ./
drwxrwxr-t 34 root admin 1258 Sep 13 22:30 ../
-rwxrwxrwx 1 username username 82 Feb 2 2006 ._QUOTA*
drwx------ 3 username admin 102 Sep 13 18:39 data_drive/
drwxr-xr-x 15 username username 612 Jan 17 2006 data_drive 1/
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root admin 1 Sep 13 22:31 system_drive@ -> /
system_drive:/Volumes username$

So what it looks like is that when I log in, the OS either can't see or can't access the data_drive and creates a faux data_drive with my home directory on it and then once I log in, the actual data_drive is mounted as data_drive 1. I've never seen the .QUOTA file and am assuming it has something to do with the faux_drive.

My only guess is that my data_drive is beginning to fail even though disk utility gives it a clean bill of health. I'm going to begin backing up my data and reformat, but was curious if any of you have seen something like this before.

Many thanks in advance!

[mosx86]

I poked around a little further and it appears that I have about 15GBs left on the drive. Do you think this can explain the wonky behavior?