pre-boot "Press S to skip mounting" error
 

Recently I made a few changes, using Gparted, to the partitioning on my disk of my Linux Mint installation, and since then I am getting an error (from GRUB2 I assume) upon booting up into Mint, before Mint boots, a message which appears so briefly on the screen, that I barely have time to read all exactly what it says before the OS boots. It is something like the following: "The disk uuid=[long string of numbers and letters]…. is not ready yet or not present, Continue to wait; or Press S to skip mounting or M for manual recovery." So far I have made no attempt to press either S or M, but have just waited this brief time I mentioned and then the OS boots. My Mint disk partitions before making the change (and before encountering this error) looked as follows here: http://imagebin.org/203625 and after the change (with error message occuring as described) now looks as follows here: http://imagebin.org/204013

The modifications I made to the Linux partition system were:
1. Resize root partition (made smaller).
2. Deleted logical swap partition previously located within sda2 (extended partition).
3. Deleted extended partition.
4. Created new swap partition as primary.

Since the change(s) in partitioning, Linux has been booting normally other than the pre-boot error message as described.

Why might this error message be occuring? And just as importantly what might I be able to do to fix/avoid such error? thanks

Compare the contents of /etc/fstab with the output of sudo blkid.

fstab tells your OS what to try to mount; blkid says what's there at the moment (mounted or not). You probably changed the UUID of one of the partitions - the swap, I would guess.

If that's the cause, edit fstab (as root) and correct the UUIDs, or labels, or devices.

Your new swap partition doesn't have the same UUID as your old one, so you need to edit /etc/fstab to either use the new UUID or to use the /dev/sdXY format instead.

Yes Secret Code, after checking as you describe, and seeing that was indeed the cause, I did as you suggested (corrected UUID in fstab), and the issue seems resolved. Booting now without error. thanks

I did as suggested (edited fstab using new UUID) and issue seems resolved. No error on bootup now. How complicated is it to instead of going the UUID route is it just to use the /dev/sdXY format? Brief response fine for now, I can google about it after a while and check into it. Thanks!

Using UUIDs is a better option because it works the same even if you add or remove drives (so the /dev/sdX letter changes).

It just doesn't handle reformatted drives (as when you deleted and recreated the swap), even in the same position.

Unless you plan to do this a lot (!) what you did up to and including editing fstab is the best approach.