Fedora 16: dropping spontaneously into "Emergency Mode"

[T.C. Hollingsworth]

On Sat, Apr 7, 2012 at 8:01 AM, Chris Hall
<chris.hall.list at highwayman.com> wrote:
> Having recently installed Fedora 16, replacing Fedora 14, I am now plagued by the thing spontaneously falling into "Emergency Mode"... "Welcome to Emergency Mode" ha ha !
>
> The last things in /var/log/messages are:
<snip output>
>
> As it happens, /dev/sdb5 is a back-up partition... so is not in use most of the time... so (assuming this is the trigger for the system falling over) I don't know why it was suddenly felt to be essential to be able to start it... it is mounted when the system is booted.
>
> The other suspicious character is ntpd to whom somebody has sent a SIGTERM and who appears to have sent a lot of "stuff" to the logging, which is nowhere to be seen :-(
>
> Can anybody point be in the direction of what is going on here, and how I may be able to restore some stability to my Fedora 16 installation, which is currently falling over about once a day at random.

Well, the real fix here is to figure out why /dev/sdb5 isn't mounting.
 Do you get any messages from the kernel at that time?  It looks like
you just grepped for systemd.

To workaround the issue, you can switch /dev/sdb5 to be mounted
on-demand when you first access it, instead of on boot, by adding
"comment=systemd.automount" to the options section of the device in
/etc/fstab.  Or, you can tell systemd that you don't care that the
device can't be mounted by adding "nofail" to the options section
instead.

-T.C.