I have an EeePC 1005HA running Debian Squeeze (32 bit). It can read USB thumbdrives and hard drives just fine, except for one drive: my Maxtor "Basics" 1.5TB. Whenever I connect that, the whole system slows down to a crawl.

Strange thing is, if I reboot the computer with Puppy Linux instead, I can read the external disk just fine.

Stranger still, my main desktop box too has Debian Squeeze 32bit, and has no trouble reading it.

What could be causing this?

Thanks.

have you tried to install different file manager?
mounting hard drive may solve the problem if drive is detected in lsusb and in /dev

It slows down even if I don't open the file manager at all, merely plugging it in is enough. I'd try mounting manually, but the system slows down SO much that I can't even open terminal windows - I can't do anything at all until I unplug the damn thing.

Is there any way in which I can disable automount for one specific device? Maybe that's somehow causing the issue.

With a combination of, or one of the other of, Udev Rule modification, and/or an appropriate /etc/fstab entry (or-- gaaahh!! editing a HAL config file -- let's hope not), the answer is yes, you can disable automount of one specific device. An fstab entry would be the easiest way; something like:
The "noauto" item causes no automounting.

I'm curious: have you considered starting `top` or `htop` and watching what happens when you connect the device? It may give a clue what program or process is hanging the machine, and that might help someone suggest why it's doing this.

What the... I just plugged it in and everything works fine! (Before you ask - yeah, I did try with a reboot before.)

Uh... I guess that's good. I hope it doesn't screw up again.

So much for that. *sigh*

Here's a screenshot of top while VLC is struggling to load. It usually takes mere seconds for it to start, but this time it took 30 to 40 seconds. Strange thing is, in the meantime xterm/top and Chrome kept working just fine. When it finally did load I managed to watch an episode, then went to watch another and everything became unresponsive again. Chrome and xterm/top kept working, but running a simple ls in another xterm window was impossible. Then I unplugged the drive, and after a few seconds everything went back to normal.

Something you don't see in the screenshot is that occasionally metacity comes up in the list, stays there a very short time, then vanishes again. Also, Xorg is usually up there - but it wasn't in the precise moment when I took the screenshot. I don't know if that's significant.

Oh, and another thing - Debian is running from a SD card. I don't know if this is significant either, since it reads other media just fine and the system is generally quite speedy all things considered, but there you go.

Edit: I just tried copying a few files on the SD card so I could watch them, and the transfer is going impossibly slow.