I have Fedora 16, x86_64, Sfce desktop, everything up to date. The computer is a Thinkpad T61 which normally lives in a dock on my desk. Attached to one of the USB ports on the dock is an external hard disk.

When I reboot the computer sometimes the external drive mounts, sometimes not. If it is not mounted it will be grayed out in the file browser. I can mount it easily just by clicking on it, even if grayed out.

The problem is that the disk contains old out of copyright classic movies that I seed via torrents. I used Ktorrent for my bittorent client, and it is not very graceful if it can't find the file when I launch it. If the file is missing it pops up a dialog box about the missing file, *and for each and every one of the nearly 100 movies it repeats the stupid dialog box*. I have to kill it, manually mount the USB drive, then re-launch Ktorrent.

The baffling part is that sometimes the USB drive mounts, and sometimes not. There is no entry for it in fstab. I'm not terribly clear about fstab, but when traveling I don't want Fedora to be looking for a drive that doesn't exist.

I just want the drive to mount automatically every time I plug the computer into its dock and restart it. I could use some suggestions for troubleshooting why it sometimes mounts and sometimes does not. Oh, and it works perfectly once it is mounted, suggesting that it is not a hardware issue.

Any suggestions welcome.