Comment # 5 on bug 926330 from Bernhard Wiedemann

(In reply to Thomas Blume from comment #2)
> Hm, your example suggests that the whole device holding /home is not present.
> In this case, fsck would fail, even before the mount is attempted.
> I thought that even on System V systems, the boot would fail if an fsck
> fails.

Just tested on SLE-11-SP3 adding to fstab
/somedir /dev/vdx ext3 default 0 0

and this just boots fine. 
It only fails, when setting the last param to 2 to trigger a fsck
and then goes into a sulogin with the rootfs mounted.