I believe my Amarok collection fails because the USB-drive mount order and names change on reboot.  If I am using Media Monkey on Windows XP, the player knows which USB drive is which by the drive letter without regard to plug, boot, or mount order, and doesn't hang if the drive is not found.

If three USB drives are attached and mounted, Amarok can successfully create a database initially, but after a reboot the three USB drives may mount in a different order depending on where they are plugged in, for instance, and then get different drive labels.  Amarok then attempts to update the collection and hangs.  Obviously, the paths have changed.  From the forum, it looks like there are other bugs, but this seems like a solvable one.  How do I assign persistent drive labels to USB drives that may be plugged in different places, mount in different orders, or not always be present to Ubuntu and Amarok?

Additionally, creating Amarok's ability to do this by default seems like a reasonable feature in a world of portable devices.  Have I missed it somewhere?

Amarok 1.4.7 on KDE 3.5.8 using default database in Ubuntu 7.10

This link was helpful to me:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RenameUSBDrive

It is important to keep in mind that if the re-labeled drive is at times visible to other operating systems or a network, you should consider whether changing the drive label may affect paths on those other systems.  That said, creating persistent labels seems to have cleared the "Amarok hangs while updating the collection" problem for me.