Swapping external drive causes new clips to be ingested onto internal Mac drive. Why?

Hi folks,
I've recently begun to swap my external hard drive (the one I use for ingesting AVCHD video clips) for another, due to many projects on the go. What I'm finding now is that when I ingest new footage, it winds up being ingested onto my laptop's internal drive, even though in the FCE4 settings it says that my scratch drive is the external one. Of course, my laptop drive then fills up very quickly. I then have to copy all the files from the laptop's internal drive to my external video drive and reconnect the media. It's time-consuming and frustrating. Anyone know why this is happening and how I might correct the problem?
Thanks very much,
Vic

Both of the drives I'm swapping out are firewire drives. The system picks up whichever is connected and identifies it fine. However, I did notice, the first time I swapped, that when I swapped back to the first drive, FCE created a whole, second set of files for video capture, render and audio; both sets of files are on the one drive; from that point on, any new projects went into the second (redundant) set of capture/render files. Everything still worked fine, so I let it go.
I continued to use the system that way, but when I swapped out the external drive a few more times, the ingesting of new project files started going to my MacBook Pro's internal hard drive. It's as if the computer has become confused because I've been swapping drives.
I read awhile back that it's very important to name external drives with names that are very different from one another, otherwise the system doesn't always know which drive is which. Weird, especially since computers are so very particular about keystrokes! Anyways, I heeded the advice and gave each of my drives names that are in no way similar. I mention this because it could be relevant to what I'm currently experiencing. All I know is I'm baffled. Seems to me that switching out drives between projects seems like a logical way to deal with the huge file sizes involved in HD video.
Anyways, I will try your suggestions. How do I trash the FCE Preferences?
Also, what does Repair Permissions do? Is that, like, some kind of factory re-set?
Thanks very much Al.

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Message was edited by: Dave Swinnard

Dave Swinnard wrote:
Booted from the SL update disk and ran disk utility to attempt to erase the existing data and repartition - no go. Attempts to erase, change partition size, repartition, verify, or repair all met with an error about being unable to unmount the drive.
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