update on external hardisk

today I took the disk (see previous post http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/blog.php?b=1711) back to the shop with my receipt, and a helpful attendant plugged it into a windows laptop there, and noticed that it said "this device can perform faster" meaning that it was only working as a usb1 device (uhci, not ehci) under windows as well. so i swapped the disk for a 320GB one, after she first checked the new disk by plugging it into the windows laptop.

at home, I can now use the disk without disabling ehci, so it looks like the original disk was at fault and not any part of linux. the only linux 'bug' seems to be that it did not automatically fall back onto uhci when ehci failed. granted this alerted me to the problem, but in this case windows gave a more helpful response by using uhci but giving a "this device can perform faster" message.