Does a bad /etc/fstab entry of a 'spare' drive prevent system booting?

I run Debian 13 on a ThinkPad t470 laptop.  It has been very reliable
over the years but just recently a secondary drive (not used at all
for boot) has become a bit flakey and now it won't boot at all.

It gets to:-

    Cannot open access to cosole, the root account is locked
    See sulogin(8) man page for more details

    Press enter to continue

Pressing enter gets one nowhere.


I'm creating a new boot/installation USB stick so I can boot from USB
and then edit the system's /etc/fstab to remove the faulty drive's
mount. 

However it does seem a bit 'unfriendly' to make the system totally
unbootable if a drive that isn't needed at all for the boot process
can't be mounted by fstab.