/home not mounting during bootup (stable, ppc)

[Rich Stanton <stantonrj@Cf.ac.uk>]

I'm running debian stable (PPC) on an old mac G3.  My /home partition is
on an external SCSI drive, and is listed as follows in fstab:

# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
proc            /proc           proc    defaults        0       0
/dev/hda3       /               ext3    defaults,errors=remount-ro 0       1
/dev/sda1       /home           ext3    defaults        0       1
/dev/hda4       none            swap    sw              0       0
/dev/hdc        /media/cdrom0   iso9660 ro,user,noauto  0       0

However on bootup I get the following error when it tries to mount the
home partition:

The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2
filesystem.  If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2
filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock
is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock:
    e2fsck -b 8193 <device>

It gives me the option to continue anyway, which I do, and it then
mounts fine and I can use the machine perfectly well.  While playing
around I changed the <pass> column value to 0 for /home and after that
the error message went away on bootup, primarily because the drive is
now not mounted atall at bootup.  I see no mention of it atall with
dmesg.  However if, after booting, I run 'mount /home' it mounts
perfectly.  Anyone any ideas what's going on?