Carlos E. R. wrote:
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The Tuesday 2005-08-23 at 07:01 -0700, Randall R Schulz wrote:
This does not make sense. The fstab file is not read and acted upon until the system is booted and beginning its start-up processing. The inaccessibility of a drive listed in /etc/fstab may prevent normal system function in various ways, but unless the missing device holds the root file system volume / partition (specified elsewhere, of course), it will not prevent the system from booting.
But it does... I have seen it. The problem appears when the boot.rootfsck or boot.localfs tries to fsck a drive that is not connected. I don't know which versions of SuSE are affected, or if it happens in all cases (it doesn't make much sense for a usb drive, for instance).
And the automount routines can modify fstab...
I think that it is necessary here to ensure that we understand the terminology being used in this discussion. You mention "usb drive" - and by this I think you mean a flashdisk, one of those USB small thingies which now range up to 2GB in storage. The situation I was describing and giving a warning about is an external HD which is connected via a USB port. My HD I was describing is partitoned into 3 parts (logical drives)- 1x NTFS, 1x FAT32, and 1X Resierfs. These partitions were inserted into fstab as SDA5, SDA6 and SDA7. Sda1 was taken up by a USB flashdisk which was aslo plugged in at the time but this disappeared when I unplugged the flashdisk. Cheers. -- The first myth of management is that it exists.