When I installed a user, none of the external disks appeared on the Gnome desktop, but appeared when I opened Places. This is what I want as I have nine partitions. All of a sudden, Gnome is showing all the disks on the desktop. I have to manually, one by one unmount them. That is the clue. I am using 64 bit Fedora 9. Same problem appears with PCLINUXOS, but not with UBUNTU.