USB drive order

[sesamsys]

My laptop has a built-in 4-in-1 USB cardreader and I am using a USB external hard drive. The problem is as follows: When I start the computer without the USB HDD plugged in, the kernel recognises the cardreaders (sda, sdb, sdc, sdd) and then afterwards the USB drive gets sde. However when plugged in it becaomes sda, and the respective letters are assigned to the cardreaders. However since it is an NTFS drive I need to pass UMASK=0 in /etc/fstab to be able to access the files as a user not only root. But this way if I forget to unplug the drive when booting, it screws up the mounting. Is there a way to "tell" the kernel to recognise the USB HDD after it added the cardreaders?
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SeSam.hu - Kansai Edition
Linux lillemor 2.6.23-gentoo-r6 #1 SMP Mon Jan 28 08:41:19 JST 2008 x86_64 AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4200+ AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux

[SinoTech]

If you are using UDEV, you can tell it which device gets what name. I haven't done that before, but think this is what you're searching for.

Mfg

Sino