[SOLVED] Boot failure - emergency mode - FSTAB and missing external drive & network drive cause boot failure.

[smurphos]

Hi,

I've had Cinnamon 18 installed on a HP Laptop as the only OS for a few months now. The Laptop 99% of the time is used at home only with an wired network connection and a permanently attached external HDD which is primarily backup storage, I also have a secondary backup on a another external SSD attached to a second laptop whose primary use is a Plex Server which is mounted on the HP laptop as a Samba share

On the HP laptop I'd added both the external drive and the Samba Share to /etc/fstab to automount.

Today is the first time I've tried booting up the laptop sans external drive and normal network connection on a weekend away. Horror - the machine fails to boot to desktop and will only boot into emergency mode. Slight panic and bit of headscratching and noting the CIFS failure error messages I edited FSTAB from emergency mode (sudo nano /etc/fstab) to hash out the extra lines and hey presto on a full reboot the OS loaded.

So immediate problem resolved but my questions are 1) Is this an avoidable problem, and 2) why on earth does this type of hardware change cause a catastrophic boot failure. An average non-techie type would likely have been utterly lost as to the cause of the problem and potential solution. A boot to desktop with a notification about failed mounts would be more user friendly......

Edit to add the two FSTAB lines now #'d out

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# External Drive
#UUID=7f5c52d4-a3ee-44b1-bbbe-230bdb1e6d13 /mnt/backup_drive ext4 defaults 0 2
# Plex Server Network Share
#//192.168.1.3/shared_storage /mnt/plex_server_drive cifs uid=steve,credentials=/home/steve/.smbcredentials,iocharset=utf8,sec=ntlm,_netdev 0 0

[smurphos]

Is it the error check on the external drive mount causing the boot failure?

Should that line be

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# External Drive
#UUID=7f5c52d4-a3ee-44b1-bbbe-230bdb1e6d13 /mnt/backup_drive ext4 defaults 0 0

instead of

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# External Drive
#UUID=7f5c52d4-a3ee-44b1-bbbe-230bdb1e6d13 /mnt/backup_drive ext4 defaults 0 2

[deepakdeshp]

There are othe options as given in the link.
man fstab will give the manual for fstab.
https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2080957

To test fstab changes you need nt reboot every time.


To mount all filesystems mentioned in /etc/fstab immediately, use the following command:

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# mount -a

[smurphos]

Thanks for the pointer....

Issue cured by adding a nofail option to both the offending FSTAB entries.

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# External Drive
UUID=7f5c52d4-a3ee-44b1-bbbe-230bdb1e6d13 /mnt/backup_drive ext4 defaults,nofail 0 2
# Plex Server Network Share
//192.168.1.3/shared_storage /mnt/plex_server_drive cifs uid=steve,credentials=/home/steve/.smbcredentials,iocharset=utf8,sec=ntlm,_netdev,nofail 0 0

[donblanco]

sorry to necropost, but - this 'nofail' tip saved my bacon just now, so thanks!