USB disk access of every type is hosed - HELP!?

Question

Newbie with the very latest "Don't Panic" running on a laptop.  I'm coming off a year with various bloateddistros, looking for something fast and stable.
I've got my internal drive up, networking, x, gnome and openoffice all working great.  Next step is to plug in my external 160gig drive with all my data on it.  This is a very standard USB2-to-EIDE drive, I've had no problems with it in any distro.  It's split between a 32gig FAT32 partition and a 119gig Ext3.
I followed the wiki on autofs.  Nothing.  Then played with HAL and the like.  Made my user a member of group "storage".  Still nothing.
I've seen mount problems before of course, so I tried adding gparted via pacman and running that from a root command line just to see what's physically out there.  Not good: gparted never finishes getting past the "Scanning all devices....." process with the blue bar bouncing back and forth.  When gparted first starts I can hear the external disk spin up and chug for a few seconds, but then nothing.
I tried a 1gig USB flash critter (probably Fat32), nothing there either.  I think something is fundamentally hosed in my USB disk support.  I do have a USB external trackball working though...so my ports are up.
My daemons at present:
DAEMONS=(syslog-ng network netfs crond ntpd hal cups gdm alunnd)
Heeeelp!  Neeeed my daaaata!
Wait, something else weird: if I turn on the external disk I see some CPU activity on my gnome panel monitor.  Nothing major, a few light spikes.  I've got a Celeron 1.6 but with the new 533 memory bus and 2gigs RAM.  Once I run gparted it goes bananas and then once I close gparted CPU activity is pegged hard at 100% - yet there's no listed process eating that.  Then when I turn off the external drive, CPU activity falls back to normal.
WTF, over?
Jim

Answer 1

Well before reading Veek's post I got further along.  Almost there I think.
I went and loaded XFCE4 plus extras, and logged in with a XFCE session.  I like having a backup desktop environment anyways in case Gnome gets squirrelly.
In XFCE Thunar shows the disks, but when I try and access 'em I get:
Failed to mount "128G Volume".
(exo-mount:4613): Gtk-WARNING **: Locale not supported by C library.
    Using the fallback 'C' locale.
You are not privileged to mount the volume "128G Volume".
What I can't figure out is, what permissions?  I'm added to groups "storage" and "disks"...any more needed?
The output from fdisk -l:
bash-3.2$ fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1        9729    78148161   83  Linux
Disk /dev/sdb: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1               1       19457   156288321    5  Extended
/dev/sdb5               1        3824    30716217    b  W95 FAT32
/dev/sdb6            3825       19457   125572041   83  Linux
bash-3.2$
I'm going to jump back to Gnome and try Veek's concepts...