What type of partition is yours? Mine's an ext2. I'm
thinking of running
tune2fs to convert it to ext3 to see if that makes a difference.
Mine's ext3.
I have suspicions that the problem lies somewhere further down than
the filesystem, because the hard disk partition doesn't actually
appear in sysfs until I run partprobe.
I'm not quite sure what partprobe pokes though.
Are you using LVM?
Rob