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

On Mon 25 May 2026 at 12:41:30 (+0100), Chris Green wrote:
> 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.

IIRC, around the time of jessie, systemd's interaction with fstab
changed, but   man fstab   and the Debian wiki page haven't really
caught up. I'd look at   https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Fstab
for a more comprehensive view.

(To be fair,   man fstab   does contain a disclaimer:

   "This document describes handling of fstab by util-linux
    and libmount. For systemd, read systemd documentation.
    There are slight differences."

but no references.)

Cheers,
David.