Re: Removing a disk on an Ubuntu machine

[David Kastrup]

Phil Holmes <email@philholmes.net> writes:

> 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.

Disks in /etc/fstab are essentially considered system disks that may
contain parts essential to running the system.

The kind of thing that Windows asks you to call your congressional
representative for if you want to swap them out.

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

There is a whole entertainment industry based on the premise that this
is a good rather than a bad thing...

Still, somehow one was less miserly with wasting one's hours on useless
things when one was younger...

-- 
David Kastrup