# mountpoint not existent, dropping to single user mode



## da1 (Aug 21, 2010)

Hello fellas,

I have a 8.0 i386 vmware machine for the sake of testing the following behavior:

What happened when a "secondary" hdd cannot be mounted at boot ? From experience I know the OS drops to single user mode, which I find incredibly stupid because a "non-OS" hdd should not stop the OS from booting up (imagine the hdd has a malfunction and then you get lucky enough to get a power surge - the OS won't come up because of a darn non-OS-important hdd).

TEST scenario:
2 hdd's. The system is installed on the first one, and the second one has "/mnt/2" as mountpoint. The 2nd disk was labeled and a new ufs partition was created. I added the corresponding fstab entries and then I deliberately removed the "/mnt/2" folder.

FYI: this "secondary" hdd has no data on it whatsoever.

Then I rebooted and of course the system went in single user mode. And now my question: "WHY????" (I know that "rc" finishes abnormally)

The hdd has no relevant data on it, the OS has no files on it ... basically it does not get in the way of anything (except the perfect execution of the "rc" framework).

Anyway, it seems to me that "secondary" hdd's mount failure should be "ignored" and an OS should be able to come up if one mountpoint does not exist or if an entry in fstab is wrong (again, I am talking about non-OS related hdd/mountpoints).

To make things worst, I tested a RHEL5 and the system booted without any problems even if the "secondary" hdd's mp was missing.

Can someone explain this "weird?" behavior ?


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## wblock@ (Aug 21, 2010)

If the second hard drive needs to be mounted when present, use amd(8) or hald(8) or your own script.

If it's just extra storage that you manually mount when needed, add the "noauto" option to its entry in fstab(5).


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## wblock@ (Aug 21, 2010)

As for stopping when a device specified in fstab isn't present, I'd call that a design decision.  Going on after what looks like a hardware failure could cause more damage to filesystems or even hardware.

That said, it probably wouldn't be hard to modify the /etc/rc.d/mount* scripts.  Kind of like putting black tape over an "engine warning" light.


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## da1 (Aug 22, 2010)

the solution is to create a secondary script that will mount the "non-OS" mountpoints.


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## gilinko (Aug 22, 2010)

da1 said:
			
		

> the solution is to create a secondary script that will mount the "non-OS" mountpoints.



Which is what AMD is...


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## phoenix (Aug 22, 2010)

And what /etc/rc.local is good for (although its deprecated and support will disappear in some future release).


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## da1 (Aug 22, 2010)

I didn't realize what amd is for. Reading about it, it seems to be,more or less, the same as "autofs" in RHEL.

Thx for the tip.


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