Hi All ,I am new to the forum as member but have buried myself in your endless supply of help for the past several years.
I have an engineer that makes massive log file output and requires an external HDD of 2TB to store his logs for reviewing later.
The workstation is running 2.6.18-194.3.1.el5 #1 and is patched up via RHEL Satellite services, as this is the newest release my company utilizes.
I have done this configuration on three of this users workstations with no problems at all so I am utterly confused as to why I am having problems on this specific host which is a fresh loaded OS on brand new hardware (as were the other three) all built identical, the FS structure to the hardware installed in them.

On the working hosts I first ran fdisk /dev/sdc and placed a primary partition that spanned the entirety of the 2TB HDD. I then performed a mkfs.ext3 on the /dev/sdc1 partition which went over fine.
I then created my entry in /etc/fstab as (/dev/sdc1 /usr/lfs/external2tb ext3 defaults 0 0).
I can mount and unmount the device as root using umount -a and mount -a without problems.

However on the problem host which the external was configured the same way as the other hosts externals upon boot I recieve the following error in /var/log/messages,
Aug 25 14:44:27 hostname smartd[3742]: Device: /dev/sdc, Bad IEC (SMART) mode page, err=2, skip device
and the device fails to mount on boot.

I have attempted to run chkconfig smartd off and boot the system with no smartd daemon at all.. The host boots but still fails to mount the device and returns no errors at all that I can find, either in logs or in dmesg with smartd off.
With smartd on I see in dmesg
SCSI device sdc: 3907024896 512-byte hdwr sectors (2000397 MB)
sdc: test WP failed, assume Write Enabled
sdc: assuming drive cache: write through


The other three hosts are set up identically, I built all four by hand myself so I know of no differences between them at all.

I have also noticed that if I take any of the other 3 external HDDs and connect it to the problem host those too fail to mount on boot with the same errors as the original HDD on this box.

Any insight you could provide would be greatly appreciated as I am nearly ready to pull out what little hair I have on my head.
I have browsed forum after forum and have tried so many different things it is hard to remember the, all, and this just over the span of two days.

If you require any more techinical info please let me know and I will provide it.

Thank you in advance.

Since you are running RHEL you might want to contact Red Hat Support for this issue.

I suppose I could probably do that. =)
I just figured it wasn't something worthy of wasting Red Hat's time with as I figured this may have been seen elsewhere and possibly solved by the community on some level.

Thank you for the response. If I can come up with a solution to the problem I will post it here for all to see.