F10 mounting USB Harddrive via fstab

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Fri, 2008-11-28 at 08:02 +0100, Patrick Steiner wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> i have some problems mounting my 500gb usb hard drive during boot.
> 
> here is my fstab entry:
> 
> LABEL=USB320HD          /mnt/backup_hd          ext3    defaults,auto   1 1
> 
> if i active this entry fedora 10 doesn't boot anymore.
> 
> could it be, that the usbdrive gets detected after fstab tries to mount
> the disc?

Do you get an fsck error just before the failure message? If so, this is
a known problem, see https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=471217

When the system fails to boot, I do the following:
1) Give the root password and get a Shell
2) "mount -o remount /" (to enable writing to the root filesystem)
3) Edit /etc/fstab and comment out the line corresponding to the
external drive.
4) Ctrl-D to reboot.
5) After a successful boot, but *before* logging in, get a console
(Ctrl-Aft-F2).
6) Log into the console as root.
7) Edit /etc/vstab to remove the comment.
8) Mount the external drive.
9) Ctrl-Alt-F1 to get back to the graphical login.
10) Log in to the system as myself.

This is a bit complicated because I have some stuff on the external
drive that needs to be there when I log in to my account. You might be
able to simplify it. Also, parts of it could probably be automated, I
just can't be bothered. And of course you could save some time by
remembering to comment out the offending line before shutting down your
system instead of going through the failed boot first.

It's a major PITA but it works.

poc