Fedora 16: dropping spontaneously into "Emergency Mode"

['Chris Hall']

T.C. Hollingsworth wrote (on Sat 07-Apr-2012 at 18:02 +0100):
....
> > 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.

Should I expect failure to mount a partition I am not using to bring the entire system down ?  It mounts well enough at boot time... so I'm unclear why it would need to be remounted.

>  Do you get any messages from the kernel at that time?  It looks
> like you just grepped for systemd.

The messages I clipped out of /var/log/messages where the last few just before it died (and turned off logging).

> 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.

OK.  I'll add the "nofail"... but I am astonished that a disc failure will crash the system.  In my experience disc failure is not *that* unusual !

Thanks,

Chris