USB Storage & Mounting issue

[Tim Schmidt]

I have a USB2 external Hard drive that works great with Ubuntu... 
only one problem:  The drive stays on all the time and the computer
may be re-booted ocassionally.  Upon re-entering Gnome after a clean
boot with the drive on before the computer started booting the drive
is not detected by Gnome at all.  Note: the kernel sees the drive
fine, I can mount it manually, but it does not appear in the Drives
window, nor is it mounted on the desktop.

Any ideas?

The drive re-appears fine when I un-plug and re-plug it in, or cycle
the power on it, but if I don't wait long enough between un-plugging
it and re-plugging it it appears as sdb instead of sda...  not a big
deal, just annoying.  A USB CF reader I own behaves similarly.

--tim