usb hdd and thumb drive not in /dev until hotplug

Hi, I've been googling and fiddling around for a while looking for a solution to this one...

I have a 250 GB WD external usb 2.0 hdd and 8gb Memorex Traveldrive plugged into my do-all workstation (samba for the windows boxes, mt-daapd for anyone who wants a listen, MPD for mood music, webmin, CUPS, etc.. etc..) and on 8.04 and 8.10 the setup was pretty sweet. Most everything was set up without a hitch, and being a new convert to linux (about 8.04 time) I was amazed at how many server programs I could have running while playing UrbanTerror without dropping the framerate.

Anyway, being an official ubuntu nut, I took the plunge and installed 9.04 as soon as it went official.

Second order of business, get the samba shares up and running to keep the wifey happy. Now, for speeds sake I installed webmin as I like to rewrite the smb.conf on new installs. So I'm setting up the shares in webmin, and I notice that there is no entry in /media/ (or /mnt/) for the usb HDD, which is the overflow storage / info-that-needs-to-be-portable drive which i was trying to set up a samba share for. In 8.04 and 8.10, it was always automatically mounted. Also weird that there was no icon for it on the Gnome desktop. So, I check to see where it placed it in /dev/disk/by-id/ and there was no entry for the usb hdd or thumb drive that I had already (since boot) plugged in at the time.

Weird. It usually picks up on that. 8.04 and 8.10 did.

lsusb did however list the devices (WD and MEMOREX) on the controller.

So, I take the thumb drive out and plug it back in to see if it will at least give me a /dev/ block to use.

At the same time, I hear the usb hdd spin to life from the rest state and gnome pops up links on the desktop for the hdd and thumb drive. Also entries were automatically created in /meda/ for the hdd and thumb drive

Weird. Hot plugging the thumb drive must have triggered a rescan of the usb bus for storage devices.

Now, I must admit, were getting into territory I'm not too familiar with. I know exactly how to mount a drive by /dev/, yet I do not know how those /dev/ entries get there. Well, I do, kinda. udev does it, but I tried looking at the rules files, and wow. thats gonna take some time to digest.

So, what I'm trying to fix is the fact that it won't automatically detect usb storage peripherals in its initial state. And its a bit of an inconvenience that either me or my wife has to hotplug something to get access to a certain storage device. I'd like to just be able to push the power button and have it ready, serving files as soon as is all booted up. Just like before.

Now, i'm going to reboot to provide the standard dmesg, lsusb, /var/logs before and after I do the hotplug shuffle.

(a small aside: I realize this post is very long winded, and a bit meandering to the point. But you people volunteer your time and energy to help users solve their problems, so I might as well make this post interesting, and a decent read. Its the least I can do.)