I have an Asus Eee 900A with Ubuntu NBR 9.04 installed. When I installed the system, I made one partition on the internal SSD and mounted as /. I left 32 MB for swap space. I mounted the /home directory to a 16GB SD card installed in the memory card reader.

Although not exact, here is basically my /etc/fstab file:
/dev/sda1 / ext4 defaults 0 1
/dev/sdb1 /home ext4 defaults 0 0

But when I start up, I get the following error message:
Your home directory is listed as: '/home/tim' but it does not appears to exist. Do you want to log in with the /(root) directory as your home directory? It is unlikely anything will work unless you use a failsafe session.

If I log in with a fail safe session, and then edit my fstab file, or even just open it without a modification, and then restart the computer (without powering down) then it will work. But if I power the computer down, it goes back to the error message. When I am able to get the system started, I can see that the /home directory is in fact where it belongs and it's all there.

I did find a solution to my problem in between posting and now as I continued my troubleshooting. In the memory card, under the root directory was the folder "tim". What I did was create a new folder "home" and then move "tim" under "home". This seems to have corrected the issue, the system now logs in with all of my settings each time. I suppose alternatively I could have also changed my HOME environment variable to point just to "tim" instead of "home/tim", probably would have had the same effect.

Looks Like I Spoke Too Soon Yesterday As I Woke Up This Morning And Experienced Exactly The Same Problem. I Checked The File System On The Memory Card And Everything Is There. I Changed Back To The UUID In The fstab But There Was No Change. Tried Changing The HOME Environment Variale But Also Got The Same Results..........