Problems mounting External USB Drives

[Lawrence Houston <houston greenfield dyndns org>]

RHEL3 Users:

As a corollary to my previous Posting about Bad Sectors on an Internal 160 
GIG SATA Drive, we have been attempting to connect Large External USB 
Drives to facilitate a Full System Backup.  The System is a Dell Precision 
370n running RHEL3: when Large External USB Drives (a Maxtor 500 GIG and 
an HP 300 GIG) are connected the System Logs display Error Messages which 
look as follows (the Drives are NEVER identified by RHEL3 and hence can 
NOT be mounted):

  hub.c: new USB device 00:1d.7-5, assigned address 3
  usb.c: USB device not responding, giving up (error=-71)
  hub.c: new USB device 00:1d.7-5, assigned address 4
  usb.c: USB device not accepting new address=4 (error=-71)

Curiously an External 100 GIG Maxtor USB Drive is already working under 
RHEL3 on this DELL and the larger Maxtor and HP USB Drives work correctly 
when plugged into another Machine running Window XP...  What might the 
problem be with these larger External USB Drives on this RHEL3/DELL 
Combo???

NOTE: I have read that Maxtor's USB Drives do NOT Officially Support
      Linux, although they do work for some people...

Lawrence Houston  --  (houston greenfield dyndns org)