A method and apparatus are used for detecting a radio link (RL) failure and a post verification process. A quality of a downlink fractional dedicated physical channel (F-DPCH) is monitored once a transmission on an enhanced dedicated channel (E-DCH) has begun. It is determined whether the quality of the downlink F-DPCH is below a predefined threshold. If the quality is below the predefined threshold, then an occurrence of an RL failure is declared and a transmission over the E-DCH in a cell forward access channel (CELL_FACH) state is terminated. In a case of the post verification failure, E-DCH resources are released.