I'd like to copy the entire contents of a partition (containing mva2006) onto a partition of separate physical disk. However, when I try to attach this target disk to my laptop via USB, the system refuses to recognise it. Since another (ext3-formatted) disk with a single partion can successfully be mounted, I'm assuming that the problem lies with the fact that the target (USB) disk contains multiple partitions.
If this is the problem, is it possible to configure the USB-subsystem to deal with multiple partitions? Thanks.

I've had smiliar problems with my WD Mybook(NTFS) would like to know if there is a fix for this. Most of the time, I end up rebooting my laptop and I guess HAL mounts the drive.

It's really easy on any modern, HAL based system, but 2006 was still using the obsolete supermount method of treating removable volumes...
What's happening if you try mounting the disk manually?

Thanks, scarecrow, that was the answer. I have a distro of mva2008, so I booted from that, went into recovery-mode and mounted the required USB-partition manually. The rest was dead easy. Great software as well as great advice. Once again, many thanks.