Comment 5 for bug 376020

I think the problem is that on new ubuntu installations, NTFS etc. partitions are not in fstab, but are mounted via hald at access time on gnome. I can't even use them without logging into gnome.
But this is the way new installations work, so this might be worth of a look, if you can even recognice if the drive is really portable or not, not sure about the technical details.

How does RPD detect portable drives? I might be able to look at this problem...