Removing a disk on an Ubuntu machine

[Phil Holmes]

The 2TB disk I used as an archive of GUB builds was reported to be failing by 
the BIOS SMART monitor.  I managed to boot into the OS, but any attempt to read 
from the disk was paralysingly slow. I thought the best bet was to take it out 
and possibly read it with a USB interface.  Successfully did that and confirmed 
that it was essentially unusable - very slow reads.

Booted the system up.  No go.  It reported a fail and directed me to read the 
boot logfile.  This seemed to show that it was still expecting that disk.  
Tried umount but had no effect.  After a fair amount of hunting, I found a page 
advising editing etc/fstab.  Used Nano to try that, and #'d out the apparently 
offending entry.  It now boots.  Seems a bit of a duff system that can't work 
out that a disk that isn't there should be ignored.  On Windows swapping disks 
in and out causes no problems at all.

That's another hour or so of my life gone.

--
Phil Holmes