USB 2.0 devices unmounted when Panther sleeps

I have two USB 2.0 devices - an external HD and a scanner - hooked up to my USB 2.0 PCI card in my G4. Whenever I wake up the system after it has gone to sleep, I get a message saying my devices were not properly put away, or something to that effect.

After a few minutes, the external drive reappears on the desktop and I hear the scanner wake up and everything is fine, but it's annoying. This never happened when Jaguar went to sleep.

I'm currently running Panther 10.3.3

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Alan

If you unmount everything in the Finder with the eject icon, that won't happen any more. A bit of an extra step, but it is meant to manage mounted devices etc safely

Thanks for the fast response (15 min!), but I'm not sure if that addresses my problem. I never unmount these devices before I shut down my system and they appear without any error messages on restarts. Going all the way back to OS 7.5, whenever I would wake up my Mac, any external connected device would remain mounted. It's almost like system sleep mode is physically disconnecting them without unmounting them (which should produce an error) - only they're still connected!

I think of sleep mode as a temporary system standby state so I'm not sure why it does this. Panther is the first time I've had this problem. In the meantime, I'll see if Iomega has some updated Panther drivers for the external HD.

thanks again!