mount USB drive at boot: fsck failure

Dear Debian Users,

I partitioned and installed an ext3 filesystem on an external 250 GB Western Digital USB 2.0 drive. It mounts OK manually and I can read/ write it. I added this line to /etc/fstab in order to mount the drive at boot time:

/dev/sdc1 /archive ext3 defaults 0 3

Upon reboot, I got an error at the console re: fsck not finding a valid filesystem. But when I exit the maintenance shell and continue booting, the drive mounts as specified and "fsck /dev/sdc1" reports clean.

Are the USB drivers not loading in time? I tried changing the "pass" value in column 6 of /etc/fstab to 0. This had the desired effect of skipping the fsck checks, but the drive did not automount either.

Has anyone else out there encountered this problem with mounting USB drives at boot?

Also, does anyone have any hints for recovering all of the startup console messages after boot? I get a lot out of "dmesg" and "/var/log/ kern.log", but some messages are missing. For example, the fsck messages. Are they being wiped out by messages from higher/other run levels?

Also, the box stalled during POST after reboot, which I found remarkable. Is it possible the USB drive has introduced an interrupt problem?

Whoa, that's three issues in one message. ;-)

Thanks for your help with this.

A Debian user,

Bogart Salzberg


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