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.
