Comment 13 for bug 49890

I've actually managed to solve this one by doing something completely different.

I've got a black WD Passport drive formatted as ntfs which uses a small 10cm USB cable. Whenever I'd boot up with the drive plugged in with this cable, it would be detected on boot only half the time. If I used a longer cable, it wouldn't ever be automounted on boot, but would show up in /dev, and I would have to manually mount.

I then bought a Lindy dual-power USB cable (http://www.lindy.co.uk/usb-cable-dual-power-2-x-type-a-to-mini-b-usb-2-1m/31780.html) and that's fixed the problem completely. It ALWAYS automounts when I boot-up. Since the WD Passport drives use the USB connection to power the drive, and it is known that if your USB ports don't provide enough power, the drive won't work properly. In my case, if I plugged the drive into my other add-on PCI USB card, the drive wouldn't even spin-up.

This is on Gutsy with the vanilla install kernel. The question would be, could this phenomena be related to this bug? How many of the other reporter's drives are powered through the usb cable? Could Linux be finicky regarding automounting when the drive isn't fully powered, i.e. spinning at full-speed?