External USB hard disk detection

[Chong Yu Meng]

Hi all,

Just bought myself an ASUS A3 notebook, and installed FC4 on it. Having 
problems detecting the external USB drive on boot.

I've done some Googling and here's what I've found out so far:

1. USB devices are handled by HAL (haldaemon in Fedora)
2. There are default configurations inside /usr/share/hal/fdi, but you 
should not touch it. Instead, create a XML file in /etc/hal/fdi/policy 
(you can give the file any arbitrary name), with directives that will 
override or append the default settings
3. Restart the haldaemon to get the new settings read and the USB 
devices re-detected.

Here's my problem:

1. Whereas before, on my Thinkpad, the external hard disk was easily 
detected on boot, but on this ASUS notebook, it is not. I have to 
restart the haldaemon and/or re-plug my external hard disk in for it to 
be detected.
2. The hard disk has 2 partitions on it, one VFAT (FAT32) partition and 
a EXT3 partition. The VFAT partition mounts fine, but the EXT3 partition 
mounts as read-only for normal users, writable by root user only
3. I tried setting the umask to 000 for the EXT3 partition, but it does 
not seem to change anything. Currently, I created a directory that is 
world-writable in the EXT3 partition and just dump my stuff inside there.

Has anyone seen this before? I know that I can manually define the 
partitions inside my /etc/fstab, but I am trying for something that is 
more "Plug-and-Play". Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Regards,
pascal chong