System having difficulty recognizing ext3

[elyre_elan]

Hello Everyone;

Another dumb question. It seems that I have never really had an ext3 partition on my machine(s) with Gentoo. My /etc/fstab does dilineate ext3 and I compile all of the ext3 tools in the kernel, but the machine continues to load the partitions as ext2.

On boot-up, a message flies by stating that "EXT@-fs warning (device ide0(3,4)): ext2-read-super: mounting ext3 filesystem as ext2".

Could someone take pity on me and point out where I could look for an answer? I hopefully don't need spoon-feeding, I just want a place to start my research. The keywords I am putting in my search criteria don't seem to be working. Sorry.
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