I can olny comment on firewire - I find that versdions 3.3 onwards for my Maxtor external drive to be recognised, I have to run the rescan-scsi-bus.sh script.

for emergency stuff, I keep a copy of knoppix 3.2 around as this version recognises and mounts my firewire drives automatically.

sorry have not yet played around with USB in Linux (firewire has been enough of a battle!)

@Breakout
post the results of "lspci -v" and "lsmod" if you need further help (both commands might have to be run as root).