A friend of mine had trouble with his VDR based on Debian Sarge - he added a SATA disk, partitioned, formatted an mounted it, added an entry in/etc/fstab and everything seemed to be fine - until he rebooted.When the system booted the disk was not mounted automatically at the mount point defined in /etc/fstab. After logging in and typing mount -a the disk was mounted correctly.

The problem was that the required modules for SATA were not loaded early enough. To fix this I did the following:

1. Add the required module in the correct order in/etc/mkinitrd/modules (scsi_mpd, sata_via, sd_mod)
2. Run mkinitrd -o /boot/new_initrd_filename
3. Changed line initrd of desired boot menu entry in/boot/grub/menu.lst to name of new initrd file
4. Reboot