When I installed Fedora 8 on my laptop, which dual boots with Vista, there were 2 NTFS partitions. One of these was called /dev/sda3 by the Linux boot loader (GRUB). In order to save space, I deleted this sda3 partition while running Vista because its shadow copies were hogging up its partition. I saved the space and got rid of the partition, which was just an old recovery partition which I don't need because I use a network backup for M$.

Linux booted up and works fine except for this error message:

ntfs-3g: Failed to access volume '/dev/sda3': No such file or directory
Please type '/sbin/mount.ntfs-3g --help' for more information.

How do I tell Linux to NOT try to mount /dev/sda3 ever again? This message is annoying and spoils Linux when I try to show others just how well it really works.

The file /etc/fstab contains a list of partitions to be mounted, one per line. There should be a line corresponding to /dev/sda3, and deleting this line should get rid of the the error message.

The line will either begin with /dev/sda3 or with UUID=<hexadecimal string> - if the latter, there should be a label above it, identifying which partition it is, and you may also be able to identify it by the mountpoint (second field on the line).