Mounting Shuffle causes my external hard drive to be forcefully ejected

Hi,
When I plug in my 2nd gen Ipod shuffle, it mounts in Itunes OK, and then I have a few seconds before I get a message that 'The device was not properly removed', and my external hard drive, which was mounted prior to my mounting the shuffle, and also connects via USB, is no longer on the desktop. All the references to music in Itunes that refer to the external hard drive don't work.
This has been happening repeatedly, to the point where I can't move music from the external HDD to the shuffle, because they can't be mounted at the same time.
Can you help?

I don't have the answer to your problem, but I wanted to let you know you're not alone. Whenever I try to drag and drop a smart playlist (an audiobook - The Great Influenza - eight parts totaling about 264MB) onto my iPod Shuffle 2G icon in the Devices list on the left side of the iTunes window, it will transfer about 5 or 6 of the 8 files that make up the audiobook before the external drive holding my iTunes library gets forcefully ejected and I get a message that it was not properly removed. I also get an error message that I can't copy the disk IPOD because I don't have the proper permissions (or some such).
This is going to get irritating if I have to transfer each song or audiobook part individually.

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