USB disk shows up late at boot

[Hugo Vanwoerkom <hvw59601@care2.com>]

Hi,

I have 2 internal ATA HDD's and 2 disks in external USB enclosures.

When you boot (this is Sid) the 2 USB disks report their presence 
between the messages:

'Loading, please wait...'
and
'Init 2.86 booting'
in the very beginning of the boot process.

Now the funny part: in my homegrown kernel both show up together. But 
with recent Debian kernel images only one shows up. I have a delay of 10 
secs. in initramfs-tools but that makes no difference.

The 2nd USB disk shows up eventually, but after 'Init 2.86 booting' when 
it is too late to be of use by fstab.

This isn't the first time I've asked this, but nobody seems to have an 
answer.

Hugo