Skip detection of bad hard drive at boot

[imaginationmechanic]

Seems like this is the right place for this.

I've got a data hard drive that is throwing IO errors and going bad, and I'm trying to restore the partition table and recover any data I can. Problem is my Linux Mint install won't boot because it keeps trying an initial detect of the bad hard drive and gets stuck hitting up against IO errors trying to read the drive and won't stop trying.

I simply want Linux Mint to ignore this hard drive and boot up to the desktop. Then once I'm logged in I can open a terminal and start attempting to recover data from the drive. I've been running Mint for about a year now on all my workstations and am a big fan. I use to run Slackware and could hack away at it, get under the hood to do what I want and never really encountered problems booting past bad hard drives.

I've been working with Linux long enough to feel like I should know the answer to this but my hat-o-tricks and google searches have brought forth no solutions.

If anyone can help me I'd greatly appreciate it.
Todd

[DataMan]

1. Backup your /etc/fstab file

Code: Select all

sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab-bu

2. Carefully edit your fstab file and comment with a "#" preceeding the line of code(s) where you are mounting the 2nd hard drive partitions as in

Code: Select all

sudo gedit /etc/fstab

3. Verify that all is happy again with a reboot

Hope this is of some help.

-DataMan

[wobbe98]

Move the bad disk to an usb enclosure and plug it in after you started linux.

[imaginationmechanic]

Thanks for the help guys! I'm gonna give the USB enclosure a try. I'm sure that'll do the trick.