Removing external drive causes boot failure: fsck.ext3: unable to resolve...
 

I am using an external SATA drive bay that allows for removing and swapping drives.

I'm not doing anything fancy with it... no hot swapping. However, I don't always want the drive present. If I turn off the external unit or remove the disk, when I attempt to boot up Fedora, the filesystem checker reports errors and does not let me boot up.

On a successful boot, with the external drive present, I assume that SMART or FSCK has somewhere recorded the drive's UUID, and now expects the drive to always be there.

I'll be swapping a number of different drives in and out of this bay, so there is no guarantee what UUIDs will be there the next time I reboot.

Is there something I'm missing to tell the operating system that a device is removable?

Regards,
David Marks


Fedora 7 x86
Fedora 7 x86-64
Fedora 9 x86-64
Dell XPS 720
3Ware 9650SE-4LPME RAID controller with Sidecar

What does /etc/fstab look like?

Hah! You pointed me to my own dumb mistake.

It looks like I left some old mounting info in my fstab file. I deleted the two offending lines, shut down the system, removed the external drive, and rebooted without issue.

I can probably add some mount commands to a login script instead. At least there I would get errors intstead of a complete boot failure.

Thanks for the prompt help (and please forgive the newbie error!)

Just so you know, you can find all the UUIDs of attached disks under /dev/disk/by-uuid/. You may also be able to leave the lines for detached disks in your fstab file by giving them the options "noauto,user" (don't mount automagically, and allow mere mortals to mount) and making sure the two numbers at the end are both zeroes (which will disable any fsck-ing at boot time). That is, you should be able to do this unless the disks contain parts of the filesystem required for booting and running.

Excellent! This is new to me!

So, if the drives aren't mounted automatically, what causes them to mount? Would I need to run 'mount -a'? Or does simply logging in trigger this?

I'm off to read more about fstab. Thanks for the hints.

I doubt you would be required to use the command line to mount them, though you could. "mount -a" won't work since the -a flag only mounts partitions not having the "noauto" option. Try, as root, "mount <mountpoint>" (e.g. mount /windows/D). I am not familiar with Fedora, but given that it uses Gnome as the user interface, you may see drive icons on the desktop representing all the 'noauto' (or 'user'?) partition; under the Places menu of the top menu bar; and in the Places panel of the Nautilus file browser. I believe that you'd just double-click any of these icons -- there is no need to become rooot -- to mount and browse the partitions.

gnome has a "disk mounter" applet you can add to the panel, I usually put it up near the clock. then you can simply click on the drive icon and select Mount or Unmount.

I'm sure KDE has something similar.