I am having issues in regards to the automatic mounting of some new drives we acquired at work.

We are running Debian Sarge the kernel being used is 2.6.14-1-686-smp-bigmem on a Dell PowerEdge 2800 server and have recently added a new Xyratex E5412E (RAID5) unit with a LSI Logic SAS3442x controller.

The File System (ext3) and partitions were created successfully.

We are able to mount the partitions manually by issuing the following command:

mount -t ext3 /dev/sdi1 /dat3
mount -t ext3 /dev/sdj1 /dat4

or

mount -a

However the system does not automatically mount them at boot time. Here is how the partitions are entered in /etc/fstab

# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>

/dev/sdi1 /dat3 ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 0
/dev/sdj1 /dat4 ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 0

First, update to Etch or Lenny (old-stable resp stable), including the default kernel. Then try again. Mind that Sarge is so old you're going to have serious (and I mean really serious) security issues in the near future.

You can also try a different approach...
As root, add a line at bottom of /etc/rc.local as such --> mount -a

Another thing you can try...
Under <pass> for the entries in /etc/fstab, change it to (1) instead of (0). This is how both my Debian and Ubuntu have it configured from default installation for the root partition.

/etc/rc.local does not exist, do I have to create this?

I was thinking about creating a script with the mount commands and placing it in /etc/init.d as a possible work around.

If that makes sense then can anyone else who has tried something similar provide guidance on how to go about this...general guide on how to add scripts to init.d and would this script have to mount on start up and unmount on shutdown?