External Drive Problems.

I use a 40 GB laptop drive in a USB casing as an external drive. Plugging in this drive in any of the distro does not automatically detect the partitions on the drive. While the drive is detected , as can be checked from the hardware information panel; the partitions do not appear in the parition editor from where the partition needs to be mounted before data can be transfered.

The Sandisk thumbdrive and the iBall MP3 player have no such problems.