I'm having problems geeting my Ubuntu 10.04LTS server to mount a new sata hard drive at boot time. I've verified the drive works fine on another machine, and my server is otherwise working fine. The motherboard is an Abit IP35 Pro with 6 sata ports. I have hard drives on ports 1, 2, 4, and 5 (all JBOD), with a DVD drive on port 3. I'm trying to hook up a brand new WD Caviar Black 1TB to port 6 with a single ext3 partition on it.

I realize the following part is not related to Ubuntu, but I'm trying to give all the symptoms: When I hook up the new hard drive to port 6 and reboot, the BIOS says "DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER". I tried powering the drive from another computer to see if the power supply was running out of juice, but got the same results.

Here's the Ubuntu part: I got the idea of unhooking the DVD drive from port 3 and leaving the hard drive on port 6. When I did that, it got past the BIOS, but I then I got "/data4 is not ready, S to skip, M to manually mount". When I pressed M to mount it, it mounted fine.

According to the logs, it saw the hard drive fine before that:

  sd 7:0:0:0: [sde] 1953525168 512-byte logical blocks: (1.00 TB/931 GiB)
  sd 7:0:0:0: [sde] Write Protect is off
  sd 7:0:0:0: [sde] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
  ...
  sde1
  sd 7:0:0:0: [sde] Attached SCSI disk

After I manually mounted it, the logs had

  kjournald starting.  Commit interval 5 seconds
  EXT3 FS on sde1, internal journal
  EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.

After rebooting again, it still would not mount on boot.

Given it's not a power problem, and the hard drive works perfectly in another machine, what else can be the problem? Why won't it mount automatically when it mounts fine manually seconds later?