Re: Foolproof disk device name in fstab

[Frank Miles <fpm@u.washington.edu>]

On Mon, 19 Jan 2015 03:50:01 +0100, andmalc wrote:

> I have a Jessie VPS with external disks attached.  The disks are
> specified in /etc/fstab with traditional /dev/sdXX naming.  I recently
> made changes to the disks that made a device name invalid but didn't
> notice. When I rebooted, the disk couldn't be found and boot halted in
> rescue mode.
> 
> My question is: how can I specify devices in fstab so if they can't be
> found boot proceeds proceeds normally instead of halting?  Would
> mounting with systemd with the 'device-timeout' option as described here
> be a good way?
> 
> https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/fstab#Automount_with_systemd

Regardless of whether you use systemd or some other init system, using
UUIDs is supposed to be less susceptible.

You can get the proper UUIDs using blkid() (see its man page).  Use of
UUIDs is at least partially explained in the fstab man page.

  HTH-