auto-mounting USB drives

[pkaplan1 at comcast.net]

I have a USB harddrive with several partitions attached to my laptop running 6.06.
As long as I continue to boot the machine with the harddrive attached, the partitions will get mounted.  However, if I boot when traveling (without the attached drive), and then return to the office and boot with the drive attached, the partitions no longer auto mount.

How can I get the drive to auto-mount whenever it is attached and not have to fiddle with settings after I travel?

Here's the relevant lines from /etc/fstab

/dev/sdb1 /media/hd1 vfat uid=1000,gid=1000,auto,rw,user 0 0
/dev/sdb2 /media/hd2 ext3 user,atime,auto,rw,dev,exec,suid 0 0
/dev/sdb3 /media/hd3 ext3 user,atime,auto,rw,dev,exec,suid 0 0

Paul