[ale] Soft reboot makes USB drive inaccessible

[cor.angela0 at gmail.com (Cornelis van Dijk)]

I installed a Linux distro (SUSE 13.2) on a 1 TB external (Toshiba)
USB drive. It worked perfect for days until I had to to a soft reboot
because of a hang (probably mea culpa). Starting up again, the boot
process could not find the drive. The drive probably did not properly
unmount, maybe the same thing would have happened with a hard reboot.
Never seen this problem with SATA or IDE drives. I was baffled for a
while then repaired it with a rescue disk; went into /sbin and did a
reboot from there. Worked. Anybody seen this? Thanks, Cor