Comment 4 for bug 377297

I have 3 computers now running 9.04, an IBM Thinkpad, a Compaq Presario A900, and an HP Desktop. Previously, running Ubuntu 7.10, and 8.10 I was able to make use of my external USB hard drives on each of these systems. I have 10 external drives, all formatted NTFS, with sizes of (1) 30GB, (1) 60GB, (2) 250GB, (3) 320GB, and (3) 500GB. None of the drives will mount under 9.04, and I see nothing obvious in dmesg, nothing in /etc or /media when I attempt to mount any of them. A friend who has 9.04 installed on his Compaq notebook came by and found he too could not mount any of the drives. Memory sticks (Kingston) and a no name brand mount with no problems. I also attempted to look at the drives using System-Administration-Partition Editor, which does not see the drives initially or even after running refresh several times. Booting with the Live GParted CD I was able to see one of the drives, so I tried formatting it as an ext3 file system, and then booting 9.04 found it still would not mount. I retried this 6 times with IRC help on line to assure I was doing everything correctly, still with no success. Finally I used the Live GParted CD to reformat the drive to NTFS, and rebooted the system after which I found the drive would mount as /dev/sdf1 with an entry in /media/New Volume on the system so I copied about 45GB of files to the drive and then unmounted it. I then plugged the drive into one of the other systems and it mounted as /dev/sdc1 and /media/New Volume, and then unmounted the drive and set it aside. The following day I tried to mount the drive once again, and found it would not mount on any of the systems with no indication why as previously. Googling, I found others having mount problems and tried their solutions, power the drive up first, then plug it in, plug it in first and then power on, have the drive ready prior to booting the system, etc. but nothing helped.

I'm totally lost as to what the solution is for this problem, and have tried everything I can think of, different power blocks, different USB cables, different drives, different file system. The only thing which has remained constant is the OS on each of the 4 computers I attempted to mount the drives. Could this possibly be an Ubuntu 9.04 problem? And if so, where might I find information which could be helpful in resolving it?