Comment 9 for bug 563916

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS - Server x86-64

The system failed to boot. It was apparently hung and sitting on tty7
with the only messages on the tty7 screen being (approximately):

    fsck ...
    fsck ...
    /dev/md2: clean
    boot: clean
    init: ureadahead-other main process terminated with status 4

Though text boot messages had scrolled by during the boot, none of those
other consoles had any messages left when the screen switched to tty7
and the above few lines appeared. The keyboard didn't do anything useful.

ALT-SYSRQ and "E" killed the "plymouth" task but didn't bring up the system.
CTRL-ALT-DEL rebooted right back into the hung state.

Lots of Google work eventually led me to this bug (with a false start
directing me to the ureadahead bugs before coming here).

Some hints from other bugs suggested something was not mounting in
/etc/fstab and that was the cause of this unresponsive server hang.

I booted a live desktop CD, installed mdadm, assembled my RAID1 devices,
mounted my root, edited /etc/fstab to comment out a misbehaving DRBD
partition mount, unmounted, and rebooted successfully with no hang.

I'm inexperienced with Ubuntu Server releases. I find it hard to believe
that a misbehaving mount of a non-essential, auxilliary file system would
completely prevent the system from booting, but this is what is happening.

Steve's updated release notes (#8, above) suggest that "mountall" is
actually invisibly prompting me about what to do about the unavailable
mount in /etc/fstab, but I don't want any prompts at all (and neither
/usr/share/doc/mountall/ nor the mountall man page is unhelpful in telling
me how to change its unwanted interactive behaviour so as not to prompt).

How do I stop the interactive prompting, or at least limit the prompting
wait to a few tens of seconds before continuing with the boot?

I do not want the system to hang forever on an (invisible) prompt such
that I have to make a house call to the server to answer the (invisible)
question so that the system can boot and I can then go home and remote
login and fix the broken mount. Scott, Steve - where is the documentation
that tells me how to turn off the prompting so that my server *always*
tries to boot no matter what is wrong with /etc/fstab?