First of all, are You sure that in this specific case, You don't need external power supply? As it was mentioned in HEN wiki and many posts, N900 can provide only 200 mA of current, where Your laptop (or any "regular" computer" port) is capable of putting 500 mA. Thats the case, why many power-hungry peripherals that work fine on desktop/laptop need powered hub or Y-cable on N900. also, You may want to read cheve feedback few posts before - he succeed getting his HD to work by just slowing down mounting process (that's probably unrelated, but worth try) --- Side note - and thats only my personal opinion - if You consider using less "luser like" shortcuts in Your posts, it would be much easy to read them