as said in the title, I need to boot my system from sda, my system working drive

sdb is a storage working drive

sdc is a bad disk, one of those drives that would hang every systems boot, if the system attempts to mount it (windows, linux doesn't matter).

I need sdc connected because I want to clone it with any of the available imaging tools.

Now what?

Generally speaking, I'd like to have this workstation setup in a way that, at every boot, only sda is mounted (needed for the boot up), all the other sdX should be skipped from any mount attempt:
I'll manually mount them on demand, if needed.

In other words, they may be present additional drives attached to the SATA (or IDE) ports and they will be powered up, but I want them NOT to be automatically mounted (this is the hanging part that I want to prevent)

Thank you for any tip, suggestion and or solution.

Kind regards

Cor

In /etc/fstab remove or comment out any lines corresponding to partitions on sdb and sdc,
or add the noauto option.