fscking too soon

[Steinar Midtskogen]

I run Ubuntu 8.04 on an Asus EeePC 900, to which I've connected an
external USB drive.  I've made an entry for it in /etc/fstab so it
will mount at boot.

However, during boot fsck usually fails to find the drive and the boot
sequence stops asking for root password or ctrl-D, which is very
annoying if I reboot remotely.  The drive is detected seconds later.
I need to get fsck to wait until the USB drive becomes available.  How
can I do this?

My workaround for now is to use "0" (passno) in the sixth column of
/etc/fstab and to do a mount -a in a script in /etc/init.d, but I'd
like to do this in a cleaner way.

I've tried to add the rootwait option to the kernel, but it doesn't
make a difference.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,
-- 
Steinar