Optical bay hard drive won't mount before login, anyone?

I bought an optical bay sata hard disk adapter and installed a 640gb samsung drive in it. I have an MCE SSD I use for all my OS partitions and the optical bay drive for all my media (formatted exFAT since it's natively supported by later OS X versions and windows 7)

I have my OS X home folder on the media drive and for some reason I experience this odd 'bug' where the drive won't auto mount before I login. I get to the login for my user account, enter my password and then I'm greeted by a very long scrolling progress bar... when I finally get to a desktop it is a default account and osx informs me it could not find my home folder...

I have started having the startup issues again... I then get disk utility out and can see the Media HD (drive where my home folder is located) is grayed out so I manually mount the drive, no issues, reboot, login, loads into my user account as normal... of course if I restart or shut down again I have to start the whole process over again :(

repairing the drive or os x partitions doesn't seem to work nor does repairs, I had used an fstab file but have since removed it to keep that variable out of the equation... though it never made any modifications to the boot or media drives (I used it to auto hide repair partitions on an external drive) I attempted to explicitly state in fstab to automount the partition but that had no effect on the problem and from what i've read about fstab in os x it is only accessed after login anyway.