One of my file systems failed to auto-mount on boot
 

Ubuntu 9.10 64 bit on a Dell Studio XPS 8000 i7-860, 150 GB and 750 GB hard drives.

This has happened twice in the week or so I have owned the machine. The 750 GB drive has a partition which should be auto-mounted as "quitelarge". From /etc/fstab

When I just now rebooted to change the cable on my second monitor I noticed that /quitelarge was empty. I manually mounted it and all the data is present.

I have looked at several logs (messages, dmesg, bootstrap) and even a grep of /var/log and can find no reference to /var/sdb2. Perhaps I need to search on UUID. Can someone please point me to the appropriate log or logs to search for evidence as to why the file system does not want to mount?

Thanks,

Ken

The error should be in /var/log/messages. You can also do a mount -a, which will re-read /etc/fstab and remount the filesystems. Can you post your /etc/fstab? Is there a # in front of the /quitelarge entry?

try to change 'defaults' to remount-ro

Thanks cg40oz,

There is no reference to /dev/sdb2 nor quitelarge in the message log. (My typo on the original post re. /var/sdb2.)

I will add mount -a to my things to remember list!

The applicable entry from /etc/fstab is in the original post. Uguntu uses the UUID of each resource when it writes the fstab during installation. The commented line shows that the file system in question is on /dev/sdb2. The line with the UUID is used to mount the file system as I understand. I generally remove the UUID and mount to the traditional /dev/sdb2 reference - I don't recall exactly why except that UUIDs hosed up my backup and restore strategy some years ago :-(

I had not done that on the new machine yet when the problem occurred. I have now and will reboot again to make sure everything mounts.

Thanks lieqie,

I don't really want the file system mounted read only. Perhaps is what I need?

Ken

taylorkh,

Try commenting out the whole line with the UUID. I have never used it and from reading the man for fstab it is form of label for the drive. That means if you do a backup and restore to a different computer it may not mount.

Try adding this to the fstab:
/dev/sdb2 /quitelarge ext3 defaults 1 2

Thanks again cg40oz,

Here is my un-UUID-ed fstab

It seems to work OK. Yes, I believe it had to do with restoring to a different hard drive or a reformatted hard drive - a new UUID was assigned to the partition and it would not mount until I tweaked the fstab. I can see how UUIDs would be of value for a removable medium however, for a fixed mounted drive I do not see the attraction.

Ken