[mpancha]

I noticed this problem last night, but now its just worse.

Last night I popped a DVD into my ibook and DVD Player fired up, but would not play b/c the DVD did not mount.

This morning, I tried plugging in a USB 2.0 external HD that has always worked flawlessly, and still works attached to other Macs, but it will not mount.

My USB memory stick does mount.

I wanted to do a format, but before doing that, it would be nice to have a current backup of my email. My iTunes is backed up as of last week, as is my email... however since last week I have gotten at least a thousand email messages, a few hundred of which are needed.

Anyone know how I can get the iBook to start mounting DVDs and the external drive?

[osxrules]

If you look at disk utility when plugging the drives in, do they show up in disk utility? Sometimes I've found drives are recognised but don't automatically mount. You have to select the partition in disk utility and mount it manually. Disk utility shows the drive first and the partition is the name just below it but slightly indented.

Another thing to think of is whether you drag drives out of the finder sidebar when ejecting them. When you plug them in again, they tend not to show up again. If you allow drives to mount on the desktop then this proabably isn't the issue.