Plugging in usb drives logs me out of my desktop

Not one I’ve come across before this, but when I plug in a usb drive a couple of seconds later it throws me out of my desktop and back to the kdm login screen

I’ve looked in /var/log/messages and nothing in there seems to point to why it’s happening

This is a usb ide drive in the back (motherboard) ports, the partitions get mounted on this one

Feb 16 18:48:01 beastie hald: mounted /dev/sdd1 on behalf of uid 1007
Feb 16 18:48:01 beastie hald: mounted /dev/sdd2 on behalf of uid 1007
Feb 16 18:48:02 beastie hald: unmounted /dev/sdd1 from ‘/media/Nimblex’ on behalf of uid 1007
Feb 16 18:48:02 beastie hald: unmounted /dev/sdd2 from ‘/media/STUFF’ on behalf of uid 1007

The 1007 is a guest user I added just to test in case it was a problem with my own desktop

This is what happened when I plugged a usb sata drive into the front (case) port, the partitions this time do not get mounted

Feb 13 21:43:04 beastie kernel: usb 1-1: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 2
Feb 13 21:43:04 beastie kernel: usb 1-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
Feb 13 21:43:04 beastie kernel: usb 1-1: New USB device found, idVendor=05e3, idProduct=0718
Feb 13 21:43:04 beastie kernel: usb 1-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=0, Product=1, SerialNumber=2
Feb 13 21:43:04 beastie kernel: usb 1-1: Product: USB Storage
Feb 13 21:43:04 beastie kernel: usb 1-1: SerialNumber: 000000000033
Feb 13 21:43:04 beastie kernel: Initializing USB Mass Storage driver…
Feb 13 21:43:04 beastie kernel: scsi6 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
Feb 13 21:43:04 beastie kernel: usb-storage: device found at 2
Feb 13 21:43:04 beastie kernel: usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
Feb 13 21:43:04 beastie kernel: usbcore: registered new interface driver usb-storage
Feb 13 21:43:04 beastie kernel: USB Mass Storage support registered.
Feb 13 21:43:05 beastie kernel: scsi 6:0:0:0: Direct-Access USB TO I DE/SATA Device 0041 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0
Feb 13 21:43:05 beastie kernel: sd 6:0:0:0: [sdd] Attached SCSI disk
Feb 13 21:43:05 beastie kernel: sd 6:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg5 type 0
Feb 13 21:43:05 beastie kernel: usb-storage: device scan complete

In both cases a couple of seconds after the laste line of the paste I’m being logged out of the desktop, and there’s no more information about the event than what I’ve shown

Does anyone have any ideas as to what might cause this?

Thanks

Just a couple of thoughts:
Is it a hdd or usb stick?
Try booting with the drive plugged in and see what happens.
If you login normally and switch to single user mode (init 3) with no gui and plug in the drive does it log you out?

One was a usb 2.5 sata drive mate

The other was a usb 3.5 ide drive

Doesn’t kick me out of a console login, only when I startx

I did switch graphics cards with the wife recently because her radeon x1650 pro didn’t like some game she was trying to play

I’ve ordered a new geforce to eliminate whether switching cards has caused it, it was after switching that this started happening

I read that there was a Gnome desktop bug in openSUSE-11.1 that did something like this, … but when I read “kdm login screen” it occured to me that you are using KDE, and hence yours is a different problem.

Actually oldcpu now you mention that, I did use to have gnome and there was an error about something gnome-related the very first time it happened

I couldn’t figure out how to entirely uninstall the gnome environment so I uninstalled everything gnome that I could which wasn’t throwing up a whole host of dependency errors and/or wasn’t going to affect any apps that I use

Never got that particular line again even though the problem didn’t go away

There were three devices that I’ve been trying since this started, usb pen I’ve solved, plugged it into my wife’s xp machine, had a look at it in Disk Management, the partition had gotten corrupted or something, was showing up as raw

Formatted it to Fat32 and that one’s working fine now

The usb ide hdd (one ext2 and one fat32 partition) I haven’t done anything to but it’s suddenly working fine as well

The sata usb hdd one I haven’t got round to checking today, but I remember suse throwing up some sort of problem mounting the ntfs that’s on it when I last plugged it in, can’t remember exactly what, it was a while ago

After what’s happened today with the other two I’m beginning to suspect the sata drive might have a dodgy partition on it like the pen drive did … must be gremlins here!

It’s after 1.30 am here now so tomorrow’s soon enough to check that drive out, I was planning on partitioning it to try setting it up as a bootable usb suse drive anyway

Ok … new problem

The usb pen drive mounts ok and I can write to it, but it closes down my desktop when I use Safely Remove on it instead

Nothing like a bit of variety …