Comment 6 for bug 645211

@Carl: That puts a whole new "light" on the issue you are seeing! ;-)

Yes I had come across that http://packages.ubuntu.com/lucid/usbmount package looking for possibilities as to why the drives were not being seen. I intend to use that package to try to mount drives to a consistent mount point no matter what device within /dev the drives show up as. On Ubuntu Server we have troubles that sometimes the drive decides to change devices from /dev/sdb to /dev/sdc.

However, the system still needs to see the USB drive in the first place! :-)