[NBLUG/talk] Wierdness with fstab (on FC5) and noauto

[Kyle Rankin]

On Thu, Aug 31, 2006 at 11:49:36PM -0700, Jeff Coffler wrote:
> Howdy,
> 
> I noted (much to my chagrin) that an entry in /etc/fstab, if the disk 
> isn't in the system, will keep the system from booting up.  Bummer.  I 
> wasn't aware of that behavior.
> 
> I changed fstab to specify noauto, and this still keeps the system from 
> booting up.
> 
> What's happening is this: I have two drives (Offsite-A and Offsite-B).  
> Only one of them is in the system at a time.  The other one is sitting 
> in a safe deposit box (it's my offsite backup mechanism).
> 
> When I change a disk, I dismount the old drive, hot swap the new drive 
> in, then do a "mount -a".  But obviously, that won't work if it keeps 
> the system from starting up!
> 
> My entries in fstab have been:
> 
> LABEL=Offsite-A        /mnt/offsite-a          ext3    
> defaults,noauto          1 2
> LABEL=Offsite-B        /mnt/offsite-b          ext3    
> defaults,noauto          1 2
> 
[snip]
> 
> Thanks,
> 
>    -- Jeff
> 

I believe your issue is that the last column (pass) is set to 2. This
column lets the system know what order it should fsck drives at boot. Since
these drives aren't present it errors. I would recommend changing both that
and the previous column to 0 and trying again.

-- 
Kyle Rankin
NBLUG President
The North Bay Linux Users Group
http://nblug.org
IRC: greenfly at irc.freenode.net #nblug 
kyle at nblug.org