Comment 4 for bug 367782

I use an external USB drive as /home and it seems to have worked great until about when this bug was originally reported. Something changed/regressed that caused some USB devices to be enumerated after the partitions in /etc/fstab are mounted. I can completely corroborate the experience mikeabout describes in comment #2.

It is a split second between the time when the partitions in /etc/fstab are mounted and the USB drives are detected. Let's hope this is not caused by changes intended to improve boot speed. At boot having to run "sudo mount -a" before logging in is getting tiresome. This only affects one (Dell Mini 9) of my three machines and the fstab line is the same on all 3.

The inconsistency I observed is that when the USB disk is not detected (when the partition to be mounted from fstab is missing) I sometimes get a root prompt. Other times I just get the GDM login screen even though it's not mounted.

I tried Richard's "sleep 10" & "sleep 20" solution which does not work for me.

Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope