Link has been severed

This is an interesting errno. the Single Unix Specification defines it as being 'Reserved', and gives no further help. The Linux source uses it in a few places for what appears to be networking related (eg: the network card has no link). Man pages around the Internet imply that it's a filesystem error -- the file could not be found because a link to the remote host is down.

if you get this error, good luck, and please, let us know how you did it :)

Looking at the 2.4.12 kernel source, it happens if

• an ATM link loses its VCC
• A usb network device loses its network link.

So the device is still working properly, it can't contact the remote end. How this is different to EHOSTDOWN or EHOSTUNREACH is not clear.