I am at a loss as to what is going wrong here.

I have my /home on a seperate partition located on a sata disk /dev/sda1.

This configuration has been in my computer, running slackware, for years. Now all of a sudden the /home directory is not mounting at boot time. I a getting errors of:

But above that it is recognised fine:

To add even more mystery to this, as soon as I bring up the terminal, I can mount the disk without issue.

Obviously I could simply write a quick script to check /home was mounted, and if not, then mount it manually, but this is nothing more than a nasty hack. I really want to know why the system is not seeing /dev/sda1 when /etc/fstab is processed when it clearly exists!

Any clues?

I would go back through any updates you have done and start there.

Have you installed a new kernel. Was the sata controller driver compile into the kernel in the older version and as a module in the newer version?

Things like the order you start the system may have something to do with it.

Is the module being loaded before or after the partitions are mounted. My guess is this one. The module for the sata controller needs to loaded before the partitions are mounted. Also some basic scsi modules need loaded before as well for the sata module to load.

Not a slack user so can't say where to start at and which scripts to check or place module loading commands in before startup. My guess maybe look in /etc/rc.sysinit but this is based on redhat distros and clones.

Brian1