Crash when firewire is not connected

[Craig Hagerman]

I have a weird problem. It seems that when my external firewire
(ieee1394) hard drive is turned off or not connected to the computer
Ubuntu crashes on start up. It had some error about not being able to
find /dev/sdc (or a node connected to /dev/sdc or something like
that). I am confused about this. On a previous LInux install I had
firewire set up and working OK so that it would start up just fine if
the external was not present. My relevant fstab entry looks like this:

/dev/sdc1       /media/firewire     ext3    defaults        0       2


Should the 'defaults' bit be different?