strange boot behavior

[Philip Bernstein <ppberns@hvc.rr.com>]

Hi,

  Something strange has started happening and I was wondering if anyone 
else has seen this or knows about it.  I boot off of a sata drive and 
that's working.  I added two other ata drives.  Now when I check fstab, 
it shows:
Sata drive
# /dev/sdc4
# /dev/sdc1
# /dev/sdc3
# /dev/sdc2

Ata drives
/dev/sda2
/dev/sdb1

The above works fine and the mounts are correct and everything works.

Now the strange part.

  After making any kind of changes to the drives, like setting up 
virtualbox, unmount the ata drives and remount them, add filesystems to 
the ata drives, or even updating the kernel, etc.  On the next reboot 
the drives are mounted and labeled incorrectly. Ex:
Sata drive
# /dev/sda4
# /dev/sda1
# /dev/sda3
# /dev/sda2

Ata drives
Wrong or incorrect filesystem or no spcial file /dev/xxx (this is not 
the exact msg but you get the point)

The system boots but of course the additional drives are not there.  Now 
in order to fix this, I have to reboot the system 2 more times and then 
all the drives are seen and labeled correctly.  So after making any of 
the above changes, I have to reboot my system 3 times for it to come up 
properly.  Anyone can explain?  Need more info?
The system is and AMD64 bit running Hardy 8.04 with all the latest updates.

Thanks,

--
Philip Bernstein
ppberns@hvc.rr.com