I am using RHEL5 and I am trying to partition a second 1TB disk into 3 primary partitions using fdisk. I got all 3 created, formated, file system ext3, and then mounted them fine. Added the entries into fstab and rebooted. When I rebooted it came up with a problem with fsck checking these file systems and not mounting them? Do I need to set these up differently?

/dev/sdb1 primary 40GB
/dev/sdb2 primary 60GB
/dev/sdb3 primary remainder of space

I used mkfs.ext3

how does your /etc/fstab look like?

yout should have created three additional lines like this (untested, and i'm not sure if they are complete):
/dev/sdb1 /mountpoint1 ext3 defaults 0 0

the first argument (/dev/sdb1) is the name of the disppartition
the second argument (/mountpoint1) is the name of the directory where you want to mount this partition
the third argument (ext3) is the filesystemtype
for the rest of the argument i recomend a look at 'man fstab'

Here is some great documentation directly correlating to the above post:

http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/fstab.html

I think this is a great reference for fstab and mount options.

I had the fstab setup per the instructions as

/dev/sdb1 /mountpoint ext3 default 1 2
/dev/sdb2 /mountpoint ext3 default 1 2
/dev/sdb3 /mountpoint ext3 default 1 2

I'm a little confused here:

If this is your exact fstab you are mounting each partition on sdb to the mountpoint /mountpoint. Did you create a location called /mountpoint?

I would change default to defaults

Your <dump> column of 1 indicates that you have dump installed and you want each partition backed up. I would recommend changing to 0.

Your <pass> column of 2 will run fsck to check the filesystems at boot with secondary priority after whichever is labeled 1. Change to 0 if you do not want the systems checked by fsck.

EDIT: One last suggestion! I would recommend using each partition's UUID instead of "/dev/sdb1". I do this as a precautionary measure so nothing can get borked reading the information.

I think the issue was the 1 2 at the end. It was doing a fsck and bombing, just not sure why. When I orginally set the partitions up I mounted them and they seem to be fine. It was just on the reboot that fsck had a problem?

Perhaps stagger your checks. What is error you get when fsck runs? Or does it keep forcing fsck in maint mode? Try w/fsck and dump as 0. See if it mounts like that first. How often does this machine get rebooted?