Comment 10 for bug 610869

The 'nofail' option is documented as:
   do not report errors for this device if it does not exist.

The problem you're describing is not one of reporting errors, but a lack of timeout while waiting for a device to become available on boot. 'nofail' is not a correct option to use for this.

mountall does support a 'timeout' option which can be set instead, which I believe is what you want. by default this gives a timeout of 30s (globally configurable as an argument to mountall).

This option is not documented in the fstab manpage, which is a bug. Reassigning to the mount package for this.