Problems with disconnecting USB drives

[Jeff Layton]

  Good afternoon,

I'm running Kubuntu 11.04 on a USB hard drive connected to a
4-port USB hub to my laptop (this way I can run Linux on my
work laptop when I need to :)  ). I've got another USB drive
that is formatted as ext3 and contains some data I want to access
from the laptop when I'm booted into Kubuntu. Every time I
plug the drive into the hub I get the following error message
in the system logs:

[ 161.254142 ] usb 2-1.1.2   USB disconnect, address 7

At this point I can no longer access the Kubuntu drive and the
system ends up freezing at some point because the drive is
not longer there. I've waited for a long time (15 minutes) to see
if it's doing USB device discovery but no joy.

I surfed around the net a little but didn't see any apparent ways
to fix this. Any ideas?

TIA!

Jeff