I dunno if fstab isn't flexible enough to do ext3 someone needs to tell RH real quick.

The real problem as I see it is that the ext3 modules aren't loadable by default. Not only do you need to have this in aliases and/or /etc/modprobe.d. but you also need depmod to create the depmod library so these can be loaded during startup.

This sounds like an interesting problem. I know how to get depmod etc in place. (did it for some other things) sounds like it's time to have fun, and work this one out.