I have a Maxtor 300GB external disc on a firewire connection to a PCMCIA firewire card in my laptop.

Sometimes when I boot up or come out of hibernation, the system hangs and I have to reboot. This never happened before I got the drive. The drive works fine when it wants to but seemingly at random it decides not to work.

My usual boot up technique:
1. Everything powered off
2. boot laptop
3. insert PCMCIA card and let it be autodetected by WinXP
4. connect the cable between PCMCIA card and the external drive
5. switch on the power to the HDD.

At this point it gets recognised about 80% of the time, the rest of the time the machine just freezes up and the only thing I can do is a hard reset of the laptop (hold down the power switch for a few seconds). It usually works straight away once the laptop has got back into windows (leaving the plugs and stuff connected while it reboots).

What could be causing the problem? How can I stop this happening?

Note: once it's detected and working, it tends to be OK for the rest of the session.