Booting with external HD missing - WAS:Booting into emergency mode - Help! -SOLVED

[lee]

Ahmad Samir <ahmadsamir3891 at gmail.com> writes:

>>>> > Thanks - I tried the nofail option. This is the line I have now:
>>>> > UUID=BCD0A565D0A5269C                          /mnt/Backup     ntfs-3g
>>>> nofail,auto,noatime,rw, 0 0
> [...]
>>>>
>>>> One of the arguments is missing and thus considered as invalid?
>>>>
>>>> You might make a bug report because this error message is misleading.
>>>>
>>>>
>>> You're right, I missed it before. There's an extra "," after rw in the
>>> mount options.
>>
>> I'll need to test that again, adding "," doesn't seem to make a difference
>> on my box, could be something wrong with my setup or something I am not
>> getting correctly (sorry for the noise).
>
> Third time is a charm.
>
> It's not the extra "," ; having a "," at the end of the mount options in
> fstab doesn't have any effect i.e. mounting the device works.
>
> The error "mount: /mnt/Backup: mount failed: Invalid argument" is due to
> the device not being present in the system, which is correct but the
> message is confusing as lee said (apparently confused more than others :)).

IMO the message is misleading because there is no invalid argument but
one is missing.  Man fstab says:


,----
| Each filesystem is described on a
| separate line; fields on each line are separated by tabs or spaces.
| 
| [...]
| 
| The fourth field (fs_mntops).
|               This field describes the mount options associated with  the
|               filesystem.
| 
|               It  is  formatted as a comma separated list of options.
`----


A comma at the end of the fourth field would indicate that something is
missing.  Perhaps the whole field is considered as an "invalid argument"
in that case.

You seem to say that a misplaced comma is silently ignored.  That won`t
be good, either.


Man fstab also says:


,----
| nofail do  not report errors for this device if it does not
|                      exist.
`----


Unless the man page is wrong or there is a bug, you would not get the
error message you`re getting, provided that your mount options are
correct.


-- 
Fedora release 20 (Heisenbug)