Linux recognize USB portable disk

Hi I have a USB portable drive that is suddenly not recognised by openSUSE. Gparted won't see it, fdisk won't see it, the KDE Notifier in the systray won't see it. It's an NTFS filesystem. It was recognised yesterday.

If I plug it into a windows machine it auto opens immediately. If I boot the openSUSE computer from a live CD (Knoppix) the USB drive is recognised in the boot process, works fine in Knoppix on the same computer.

If I plug a different USB drive into the computer's USB socket in openSUSE computer, that drive is recognised.

Any ideas on how to get openSUE to see this particular USB drive again?

Thanks