Attempting to mount ext3 partitions located on USB drives via fstab introduces udev/mount race condition

[archis]

A udev-mount race occurs when fs-checkable partitions located on external drives are added to fstab in Dapper.

Example fstab with one ntfs (sda1), two ext3 partitions (sda2, sda5) and swap (sda6) located on a USB HD:

http://paste.ubuntu-nl.org/14674

The boot-time filesystem check for the two ext3 partitions (sda2, sda5) fails and drops me to a shell, asking me to do a manual file system check and / or to continue to boot with Control-D.

Transcript:

http://paste.ubuntu-nl.org/14672

Note: Both partitions mount when the boot process continues. Syslog:

http://paste.ubuntu-nl.org/14673

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Note: The same fstab did not produce fsck errors in Breezy. (Possible explanation: Breezy took longer to get from S04udev to S30checkfs.sh)

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Workaround: Don't add partitions located on external drives to your fstab that will be fsck'ed :-)

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Observation: This issue affects a number of people knowledgable enough to tune their fstab but not tech-literate enough to debug a fsck.ext3 error message at boot. Some are being confused by the fsck error message into believing that something's wrong with their drives.

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=138344

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=171161

[archis (archis)]

This boot chart show the typical boot process (without external partitions eligible for fsck in fstab).

[archis (archis)]

This boot chart shows the boot file system check failing and dropping me to a shell, asking me to do a manual file system check and / or to continue to boot with Control-D.