Hello fellow questioners ! this is my first post on LQ.

I have a unique bizarr problem. I am running an Nforce3 250 motherboard with AMD64 Cpu. My other botherboard was smoked due
to an unfortunate power supply problem. . I replaced it with a MSI K8N Neo V2.0 mainboard. After some initial futzing around, system is up and running albeit with one small annoyance. Every thing is working great except for this problem. On my previous board, I had the infamous Silicon
Image 680 adapter board working with a Maxtor 100gb PATA hardrive installed. This was working but I had to give the ide=reverse on the boot command line to make the boot order work. Minor issue but QED. Now this does not work
with the mew board I have. I have 2 drives on the onboard ATA controller hda and hdb. Also have 2 DVDRW drives pn hdc and hde.
This is working and nero linux has no problem using them. Problem is that the drive on the SI controller is foobar . It works if I mount it by hand but things get confused if I try to put it in /etc/fstab to mount automatically at boot. e.g. mount /dev/hde5
/backups works fine after the system is up. puting

/dev/hde5 /backups ext3 defaults,noauto 1 2

in fstab always causes the boot to fail and throws me into the
fs repair shell. This is in a word madening. What I ended up
doing for now is mounting the disk in /etc/rc.local which looks
like its late enough in the boot sequence to work. I guess I can live with this but if anyone has an idea about this, that would be great.

System particulars:

Redhat Fedora 4 core
Kernel 2.6.21.1
mainboard MSI K8N Neo V2.0
addin ATA card Silicon Image 680 rev 2
CPU Athlon64 3200+

Guess I should not complain too much, This MBOARD powersupply
and case cost $224 from geeks.com and otherwise works perfect.
Perhaps this box is too fast now for this shananigans to work
Its probably something dumb as it usually is.

AdvanceThanks.

There's a lot of info in your post.. To clarify something:
How many drives are there in total? I see 2 HD's and 2 optical, correct? If so, where did /dev/hdd go? Why does it go a,b,c,e ? Something to do with it being on the ATA card?

Nextly, is there perhaps support needed in the kernel for the drive or its controller (or even for the ext3 filesystem) which is built as a module, and not statically inside the kernel? If there is kernel-code required to access/operate the controller or drive (like for example the module required to use that SI-ATA card), it has to be built-into the kernel, to be able to deal with the drive at boot time. Which would explain why you can apparently mount it after (or late in) boot, but not during boot.

My Latin is rusty, and I have no idea what 'nero linux' is, so if I've missed something here, please advise
Good luck.

Thanks for the reply GrapeFruiTgirl but no joy on the build it into the kernel idea. Now I remember why I had it as a module . When I did this initially I got the cannot find root problem. Udev dies because it cant get to /dev/console on the root device (hda10) after this its a bust as udev does not make the devices for hda and the other devices like hdb etc. I have static nodes for these things on the root disk but as linux cannot get to root, Panic .
I initialy created these static device nodes so that I could
boot without initrd for an embedded project I was fooling with. After rebuilding the kernel with the SI driver built
in, I can boot again . Life is good now but with a caveat. I can live with the way it is but I will keep pawing at the docs etc.
ps
knowing how **** happens when fooling around with the system.
I keep an emergency boot kernel around for these fun times.
Otherwise I would be SOL LOL.

Just thought I would post that I found the issue. My suspicion that this was the result of something stupid was correct. Turns out that I had an entry ide=reverse on the boot options in grub. The new motherboard I have does not need it. Evidently it works right. The board that got toasted does not. After removing this bit of lint, everything works great. The SI680A card and the MSI K8N Neo mainboard works great. I recommend this motherboard as it's really sweet. Only drawback is it's a socket 754 board and it only can go to 2gb memory. It was very inexpensive and it supports the AMD64 3200+ chip. At a total cost of $224 for the board case shipping and misc hardware, it filled the ticket for a goof around linux system. Thanks GrapeFruitGirl for taking a look at my goofy problem.

Hey no worries, glad you got it fixed and I learn a new tidbit too: about the IDE=reverse thing. Interesting, and something to keep in reserve for another day!

Happy puting!