In reply to:

One possibility is a bad sector where the journal file is - ext2 wouldn't have a problem, because it wouldn't be touching that sector, but ext3 would.



Sounds good in theory, but he doesn't even have a journal file set up at the moment if I understand correctly. I suppose it could still be looking for one when it tries to do the ext3 mount before falling back to ext2...
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EmpMenuX - ext3 filesystem - Empeg iTunes integration