usb external drive does not show on desktop in Ubuntu 12.10

[jamarsh]

If I plug in a usb thumb drive, it shows up in the unity panel and in Nautilus. However, there is no response from my usb external hard drive. I know it is recognized, and I can manually mount it.

fdisk -l shows the drive as "Hidden". I suspect this may be important.

I tried the following instructions found here:
sudo mkdir /media/USERNAME

sudo chown USERNAME.USERNAME /media/USERNAME

with no success

[jamarsh]

I installed Ubuntu 12.10 on a similar but not exact model Acer Aspire laptop with the same result. I believe this is a bug in Ubuntu 12.10 but cannot find a solution.

[jamarsh]

Well, I think I finally have answered my own question. For some inexplicable reason, fdisk shows my usb drive as 'Hidden'. I don't know how or why this happened. I was able to plug in the drive and have Ubuntu recognize it up to and including Ubuntu 11.10. 12.04 did not work.

I used Gparted to change the flag to Not Hidden. Now, the usb drive shows up in the Unity launch bar when plugged in. I hope this helps so other soul out there who has been struggling with this problem.