Hi everyone.

I recently had a hard drive failure. I'm running Mint 16 with MATE desktop on an AMD A8 processor. I had two 1TB hard drives, one with six partitions for various uses, /home on it's own partition with symlinks to /music and /photos etc. The root is on it's own partion to permit clean installs instead of upgrades. The other TB drive was for backups only, and it's that one that was failing with progressively more and more bad sectors.

I've installed a new 2TB HD to replace that, and tried to run all three to let me keep/transfer the old backups, but with no joy as it seemed the backup drive had become too corrupt to mount properly. I've now removed the faulty drive.

Now, whenever I boot the machine, I get a black screen with the following error message:

keys:continue to wait, or Press S to skip mounting or M for manual recovery.

If I press S, the machine boots normally and runs fine from then on, if I press M it drops me into a command line, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to go much further with that. Waiting seems to last forever, although I haven't had the patience to test it beyond about 15 minutes.

I suspect it is still trying to find and load the old hard drive. I've tried:

sudo update-grub

but to no avail. I suspect I need to edit fstab, but as each variant of linux seems to have quirks regarding the structure of that, I am reluctant to dive in without some advice.

Can anyone help please?

Thanks,
Ian

AFAIK, /etc/fstab is /etc/fstab. Ubuntu adds comments indicating the device each listed partition was on during installation, but the structure is the same among all distros. From my /etc/fstab:Most (if not all) distros now use the UUID to identify the partition to be mounted, as in the first line above, rather than device name, as in the second line. This is because device names can change when disks are added to or removed from the system, whereas a partition's uuid is fixed (and unique, unless you use dd or a similar utility to copy one partition to another). It appears your /etc/fstab file lists partitions (by UUID) that are no longer connected to your system. If that's the case, just comment out those lines and reboot

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Thanks RockDoctor, you were spot on. Commenting out the old UUID for /BackupDrive did indeed solve the problem, what I find strange is that the new disk (renamed the same as the old) does not appear in fstab, but is accessible from the system anyway. This begs the question if it needs to be listed in fstab?

Anyway, you have removed a source of my stress. Now if only I can ditch this terrible cold I'm fighting.

1 members found this post helpful.