10.04 can't boot unattended if non-critical disks aren't working

A new feature of 10.04 desktop is that the boot process stops (goes interactive) if a disk mentioned in /etc/fstab isn't available. This is a bad thing for me. USB disks fail. USB disks are used for backups, and must be NOT be mounted in /media, which is what happens when I don't list them in /etc/fstab. I'm often out of town, and yet I need access to my computer even after a long power failure forces it to stop and reboot. Alas, if one of my non-critical disks is in trouble or has been disconnected, the machine won't boot. Instead it stops to ask someone (who isn't there) whether to ignore the fact that a disk isn't available. So I have 2 questions:

(1) How does one get the boot process to continue on when non-critical disks listed in /etc/fstab aren't working right, have been unplugged, etc. This wasn't a problem until 10.04, as far as I know. It's a real problem for me.

(2) How does one prevent disks that are connected to the machine at boot time from being mounted in /media?

I could, of course, write an elaborate script and call it in /etc/rc.local. It would be a horrible solution, though. It would have to wait around and see what gets mounted in /media and unmount it, and then mount it in the right place. Surely there's a more rational way to do this!