Why not just have it (1) try to open /empeg/var/config.ini, and (2) if that fails, sleep(2) and loop back to (1), repeating until it doesn't fail.

That's what I mentioned doing earlier in the thread... But I thought there might be a way for the preinit thing to wait until the drives are mounted before doing its work. Then all apps started from preinit would have access to /drive0 and /drive1. That could be even more important if we want to install some userland apps on those drives, which people might want to do since (a) the root partition isn't that large and (b) it gets wiped when upgrades happen. There's really no standard for where to keep user apps (I've suggested the empty hda2, a nice 32MB partition that's not really used for anything else) but by default that partition isn't doing anything, so most users don't use it for anything.

I'll try implement the sleep thing in the next release. I haven't even tried Bitt's preinit thing yet but maybe now is a good time to try it out.