Comment 12 for bug 364933

Same problem for me (and thank you, Steven, for your answer to my own question...I searched quite a bit but didn't find this bug or its duplicate).

lsusb was showing my usb hard drive, but the system wasn't recognizing it as disk space (through blkid or fdisk -l) unless I unplugged it and plugged it back in after startup. Adding usb_storage to /etc/modules fixed it. This is ubuntu 9.04, kernel 2.6.28-11-generic amd64. The same usb hard drive connected to my laptop (running 9.04 i386) has no problems.