If the bug reports I linked to earlier are any indication of the problem, the file system you are using is not going to affect the outcome. It's a USB driver bug, but you can allegedly work around it by disabling the EHCI USB driver or flip some jumpers on the drive. See my earlier posting for the links.

Era, me and my computer thank you. I did what you said and I got it to be recognized via sudo fdisk -l. so i installed gparted on the desktop, and reformatted it to ext3. Then it recognized the device. then I changed the permission rights with the link i am attaching. now i only have an unmounting problem which i have on the page under texasone.
I am waiting for response there, but anyhelp from this site would be very helpful.
thx all.

What output do you get from dmesg when you plug in your external hdd?? Does it load the scsi emulation drivers?