partitions of external esata drives not in /dev

[JD]

A new problem has cropped up with enumerating all of a disk's
eternal partitions in /dev. This has not been a problem since
may or june of this year. It just cropped up when I booted
this morning.

One external drive (sdb) is connected to the laptop via the laptop's
built-in esata port, and the 2nd drive (sdc) is connected via port 1
of the expresscard/34, which has 2 esata ports.

$ ls -l /dev/sdb*
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 16 Oct  5 11:25 /dev/sdb
$
$ fdisk -l /dev/sdb

Disk /dev/sdb: 1.8 TiB, 2000398934016 bytes, 3907029168 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x0007b94c

Device    Boot Start        End     Blocks  Id System
/dev/sdb3       2048 3907028991 1953513472  83 Linux

$
$ ls -l /dev/sdc*
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 32 Oct  5 11:26 /dev/sdc
$
$
$ fdisk -l /dev/sdc

Disk /dev/sdc: 931.5 GiB, 1000204886016 bytes, 1953525168 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0xec3cb3b1
Partition 4 does not start on physical sector boundary.

Device    Boot      Start        End    Blocks  Id System
/dev/sdc1            2048   31459327  15728640  27 Hidden NTFS WinRE
/dev/sdc2 *      31459328   31664127    102400   7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sdc3        31664128  162738175  65537024   7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sdc4       162740222 1953525167 895392473   5 Extended
/dev/sdc5       162740224  288570302  62915039+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdc6       288571392  305348607   8388608  82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdc7       305350656 1144211455 419430400  83 Linux
/dev/sdc8      1144213504 1953525167 404655832  83 Linux

The internal drive (sda) partitions are all listed
$ ls /dev/sda*
/dev/sda  /dev/sda1  /dev/sda2  /dev/sda3  /dev/sda4  /dev/sda5

$ fdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 465.8 GiB, 500107862016 bytes, 976773168 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0xe686f016
Partition 1 does not start on physical sector boundary.

Device    Boot     Start       End    Blocks  Id System
/dev/sda1 *       417753  87955874  43769061   7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2           2048    415743    206848   b W95 FAT32
/dev/sda3       87957504 960405503 436224000  83 Linux
/dev/sda4      960405504 976773119   8183808   5 Extended
/dev/sda5      960409600 976773119   8181760  82 Linux swap / Solaris