Comment 3 for bug 469837

Hi again~ Sorry, I was/am really busy with school and wasn't able to get back to this for a long while.

Here I tried to repeat my steps as I remember them:

Boot up 9.10 LiveCD. (and made the 2 boot.txt you mentioned.)
Look in Places menu, all internal drives except my hidden Vista backup partition appear. (no external drives attached yet)
Start GParted, and now all partitions show up. (and made 2 gparted.txt)
Log out, and back in.
Looked in Places menu, and it still shows all. (made 2 relogin.txt)
(A few days ago, also tried this, and at this point started GParted, but if I remember right it didn't make any change to Places menu. Didn't start GParted at this step today, though.)
Was confused, but thought may have plugged USB flash drive in at some point last time, so I inserted a 2GB flash stick. It shows up normally.
Started GParted again, and now only flash stick and vista partition show up in Places menu. (here, I made 2 more files, following your format after plugging in the USB drive: gvfs. and dkd.gprtdaftrlognusbdrv.txt)
Chose to Safely Remove flash drive.
Restarting GParted or logging out and back never brings back the other partitions. Also, re-inserting the flash drive doesn't change stuff, either.
After all that, I also opened Palimsest Disk Utility (without rebooting), and it shows my internal hard drives correctly as a Vista partition and a hidden backup partition, but my Linux partitions are not there. Instead, it says the rest of the drive is one big unallocated space. I then ran GParted with Palimpsest still opened and it looked like it auto-refreshed or something, but didn't change anything. (finally after all the opening GParted more times and logging out and stuff, just now I made 2 more files: gvfs. and dkd.aftrfewmoretries.txt)

I was just about to reboot to installed Ubuntu (writing this in Gedit from LiveCD), and thought I'd try GParted one more time. After starting it, the Places menu shows everything again! The only thing I think I did, was copy the txt files you asked for from the LiveCD /home folder into my 2GB drive. I'm not sure, but I think when I went to open my 2GB drive again, it didn't have an icon on the desktop, so I chose it from the Places menu, but I don't think the drives were back that time, until I started GParted. Now, the flash drive icon is also back on the desktop. (I just now made 2 final files: gvfs. and dkd.aftrcopytousbgparted.txt)

Also, I don't really remember getting this error in 9.04, but it seems GParted always gives me the following error in both my installed Ubuntu and on the LiveCD:
"The kernel is unable to re-read the partition tables on the following devices:
- /dev/sda
Because of this you will only have limited access to these devices. Unmount all mounted partitions on a device to get full access."
I don't now remember about the installed one, but on the LiveCD, it looks like the swap partition is in use or something (has keys icon next to it).

By the way, I heard Fedora asks its users for a hardware profile of their computers to optionally be sent back to Fedora. Is there something similar for Ubuntu? I'm curious because I feel the problems I run into don't sound common and wonder if that might help.
For example, several LiveCDs I've tried (mostly all Ubuntu, I think) keep changing my time zone by 7 hours, unless I change it before shutting down. It confuses me because I thought LiveCDs aren't supposed to change the computer at all and I never see mention of this.

Sorry for the delay (and so many files), and thank you! Have a great day!!! ^_^