Okay...this may have been beaten to death but I can't think of search queries to dig this one out.

I have a SATA drive which I use to store all my media, odd and ends etc. It is formatted with ext3. The root partition is on IDE drive. The motherboard has Nvidia nforce4 SATA chipset (sata_nv and libata).

Problem: Even though i've had /etc/fstab entry for this particular SATA drive, it would not mount. Gives me a generic error (can't recall exactly) during boot up. I'm at work right now so I'll post the error when i have access to my machine.

/etc/fstab:
What I've done: I use a custom compiled kernel (v2.6.17.7). I've compiled the kernel with sata_nv as a module and as a built-in.

In both cases, I can mount the drive easily with mount /dev/sdb1 command as a regular user once the system starts up fully but not during the boot up.

I have also tried including sata_nv module in /etc/rc.d/rc.modules but it still won't mount at bootup. Works flawlessly when i mount as a regular user after system startup.

Now I also use Arch Linux and Debian AMD64 and both of them mount my sata drive at bootup without any problems.

May be I am missing some little detail that I need to know. This happened earlier as well when this same drive was partitioned as vfat to share data between Windows and Linux. The drive would not mount at boot but would mount easily once the system starts up. Please note that I don't use initrd with slack.

Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Tux,

Is ext3 support built as a module or compiled in?

on which drive(S) is grub (or whichever bootloder(s) ) installed?

Which drive does the bios boot sequence check first?

Try editing the grub menu installed on the ide drive to include the both drives.
(@see man update-grub)

hth
~S~

In addition:
Have you compiled the SCSI subsystem modules into the kernel too?
scsi_mod
mod_sd

It looks like these are modules which will load after the OS tries to mount the filesystem via fstab. The reason it works after system startup.

Yes...ext3 support is built-in. Root partition is ext3 as well.

Sorry but I don't think grub has to do anything with that. My root partition boots fine.

Tux,

That maybe the case...I am not sure. I'll check this evening and report back. Thanks for catching that.

Later,
Tux,

Okay I've found the solution. Michealk, you were spot on about the scsi modules. They were getting loaded after the bootup but not during bootup. I had them compiled as modules while filesystem was built in the kernel. I made an initrd image with those modules and now the drive gets mount at boot. Thanks for your help.

Here's my what I did. I figured, scsi_mod, sd_mod, sg, libata and sata_nv modules were needed. I built an initrd with mkinitrd like this:

Works perfectly now. Again, thanks for your help.

Tux,