Topic: 2.6.18-411.el5 prevents successful boot?

[jimgoode]

Applying 2.6.18-411.el5 may be why my system would not boot.  It failed on boot after applying the update.

A couple of years ago I began having problems rebooting when an external USB backup drive was attached to my system.  I searched for and tried several fixes without success.  So, I took the external drive away and installed an internal drive for backups.  I neglected, however, to remove the entry from the fstab (or from the templates-custom) that mounted the external USB drive.  The boot process hung after spitting out it's error message about the external USB drive.

I was able to, after some research, boot into a command shell, remount the root drive as rw, modify the fstab and template-custom file, and reboot the system successfully.  In the process it worked through the required reconfiguration and came all the way up.

Does anyone know if having a no longer needed fstab entry might be the cause of the reboot failing?  I'm not sure this is a bug but may simply be a tightening up of the mount rules.

Thanks in advance,
Jim

[Daniel B.]

We need to know the error you get when trying to boot this kernel

[Jean-Philippe Pialasse]

if the entry in fstab specify default or auto, then the system will try to connect the drive at startup, if it is missing, it usually hangs there.

I suggest to use noauto for external hard drive and shares that might not be availables. Also you could use smeserver-usbdisks that will use a cron script to check the presence of the disk he knows to mount them


for your initial problem, if your system refused to boot when the usb drive was plugged this could be a problem of boot order in the BIOS. USB and CDROM might be ranked higher in the order than regular disk.