Do you have something on your device that the system needs and is looking for when booting? I ask, because this might explain why things are going wrong when the disk is not there.
Anyway, in order to have your device unequivocally identified by the system you should put its UUID in fstab, instead of /dev/sde2. You can see such identifier using the
blkid command. Like:
You'll get something like this:
Code:
/dev/sde2: UUID="<some-ID>" TYPE="ext3"
Put
UUID=<some-ID> (without quotes) in /etc/fstab, where /dev/sde2 is now. The system will recognize the device unambiguously and will not mount anything else on that mount point, unless it is specified elswhere.
Best regards,
Philip