Device for External hard drive not created on bootup

[Trevor "TeC" Christian]

Good day:

I have a Maxtor external hard drive on a remote machine at and office in 
town.  This drive is used to for weekly system backups on Saturday 
nights and usually works fine.

This weekend, however, there was a power outage. The UPS gracefully 
shutdown and restarted the machine.  On restart, the boot messages 
indicate that the device was recognized and indicated that it was to be 
allocated or created as /dev/sdb with sdb1 and sdb2 being the partitions 
on it, but these devices do not actually exist and as such no mount 
point can be created and the backup will proceed to fail.

Bearing in mind that this is a remote machine, and that I am unable to 
go in and unplug and replug the drive to solve the problem, is there any 
way i can rectify this?

I've looked at mknod which i came across in a separate quest re my 
TV-Card to manually create the devices, but I don't know the major and 
minor parameters that I would have to provide if this were the right way 
to go.

Any help would be appreciated...

Thanks,
-- 
*Trevor "TeC" Christian*
/TeC Productions Studios/
Cell #: (767) 225 4472
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