New Redhat kernel chokes on external hard drive when booting
 

I upgraded to kernel# 2.4.18-26.* to 2.4.18-27.* and my boot fails because of an external usb hard drive. I can still boot running the prior kernel just fine. on both of them, I get a warning that the device is not 'recognized', but on the newer kernel it will also show errors when mounting that filesystem and it won't boot up properly.

Anybuddy have a better way to set up connecting to an external hard drive? On the install I created a partition on half of it for my linux (double boot w/ WinXP), with its own swap and everything. But whether the usb cord is connected or not at boot-time, there are problems finding or recognizing it.