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

Hi,

On Mon, May 25, 2026 at 08:13:35PM +0100, Joe wrote:
> In case it helps anyone else in future, the same applies if a remote
> samba share is mounted by fstab, the share will not be available during
> boot, so it must be marked in fstab as 'not required for boot', for
> which I use the 'noauto' and 'x-systemd.automount' options.

I think you may have other issues, as this is not supposed to happen.
systemd is supposed to be able to tell (by their type) that network
filesystems like smbfs and nfs require to wait until network is up. For
filesystems that require network but don't necessarily make it obvious
by their type, you are supposed to use the "_netdev" mount option to let
systemd know.

If it's trying to mount these before the network is up then something
odd is going on. If it's failing to mount these after the network is up
then there is a problem somewhere.

This is documented in systemd.mount(5).

Thanks,
Andy