I agree about mucking about with fstab. Had issues a few weeks ago when I installed another hard disk. (necessary as my MP3 collection had pushed /home to over 90% full) In the process of putting it in and moving things around, my boot sequence got hosed and I ended up booting knoppix to fix fstab so it would recognise everything correctly.
yea autofs is really a better file to use but is not a required file on a Linux system...