Maxtor OneTouch External USB HD

Hello,

I'm using RHEL AS 3, kernel 2.4.21-27.ELsmp on a Dell Poweredge 700. I've got an external USB2.0 Hard-Drive (Maxtor One Touch, 160GB) from which I am mounting a number of miscellaneous directories. I am experiencing a problem characterised by the following symptoms :

(i) After boot-up, the system does not "see" the hard-drive. There are a couple of errors invar-log-messages which state

kernel: usbcontrol-bulkmsg: timeout

(ii) If I turn off the hard-drive and turn it on again, the hard-drive is seen OK at that stage, I can mount directories from it etc - parbreastions on the hard-drive are mapped to consecutive "slices" ondev-sdb.

Any modules related to USB which I can think of are loaded - the output of "lsmod grep usb" lists

usbserial usb-storage usb-uhci usbcore

although usb-storage is shown as unused before power-cycling the hard-drive.

I have tried another external USB HD and there was no problem, it was picked up fine after reboot so this does not seem like a generic USB HD problem.

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, John Kelly.