Ubuntu wants to perform a disk recovery on detached volumes every time it boots

[LMDevlin]

Hi all.

I used to have a 1TB USB hard drive constantly attached to my PC, predominantly to do backups to for my Windows installation. I have Ubuntu on a second hard drive, and when I first installed it it mounted all the drives present.

However, that USB drive is no longer connected, but every time I fire up Ubuntu and it goes to the boot screen, it tries to perform a disk recovery on the two missing volumes that were on the now detached USB drive (the main storage volume and the System Reserved volume). I have to press the S key to skip every time, which isn't so much of a problem as it is an annoyance- and I would like to know the best way to get rid of that.

This links to another question I had about how to best permanently remove any partitions that I do not want Ubuntu to mount. My Ubuntu drive is a 160GB SATA drive (dev sdb if I recall correctly), and I also have a 1TB SATA drive which Windows and all of my data is stored on (dev sda). The 1TB SATA drive mounts two partitions- the main Windows/data partition and System Reserved. System Reserved is constantly mounted but I have no need for it, so I would like Ubuntu to stop mounting it.

I'm pretty sure when I first installed Ubuntu 12.04 I was able to choose which drives to mount through a GUI of some sort but I don't recall exactly how I did this and don't know how to undo it.

I tried to do this in fstab by removing what I thought were the lines which corresponded with the partitions I no longer want mounted, but it didn't seem to work. I don't think I quite understand the syntax of fstab.

If anyone could help me that would be great.

[ajgreeny]

Can you show us the output of

sudo fdisk -l && cat /etc/fstab

please

[LMDevlin]

As requested:

Disk /dev/sda: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders, total 1953525168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x363ac879

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 2048 206847 102400 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2 206848 1953521663 976657408 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

Disk /dev/sdb: 163.9 GB, 163928604672 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19929 cylinders, total 320173056 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xc68581cf

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 2048 312180735 156089344 83 Linux
/dev/sdb2 312182782 320172031 3994625 5 Extended
/dev/sdb5 312182784 320172031 3994624 82 Linux swap / Solaris
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>

proc /proc proc nodev,noexec,nosuid 0 0
#Entry for /dev/sdb1 :
UUID=7844bb66-1560-4d9d-b59e-da3d3878e203 / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1
#Entry for /dev/sda2 :
UUID=306AEE676AEE2974 /media/306AEE676AEE2974 ntfs-3g defaults,nosuid,nodev,locale=en_GB.UTF-8 0 0
#Entry for /dev/sdc2 :
UUID=DEC432D9C432B39D /media/Luke_s_External_HDD ntfs defaults,nls=utf8,umask=0222 0 0
/dev/sda1 /media/System_Reserved ntfs defaults,nls=utf8,umask=0222 00
/dev/sdc1 /media/System_Reserved_ ntfs defaults,nls=utf8,umask=0222 00
#Entry for /dev/sdb5 :
UUID=c54cc4cb-52d5-44f7-ab68-92e5155cb9f3 none swap sw 0 0

[ajgreeny]

You need to firstly backup fstab with

sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstabbackup

then open the file fstab as root with

gksudo gedit /etc/fstab

and edit so that the line third from the bottom looks like

# /dev/sdc1    /media/System_Reserved_    ntfs    defaults,nls=utf8,umask=0222    00

ie, add the # at the start of the line, or even delete the line completely. After doing that run command

sudo mount -a

in terminal and if no errors appear all is well.

The reason for the problem is that the system is trying to automount sdc1 at boot, but it no longer exists on your computer.

[LMDevlin]

Thank you for your reply.

This seemed to remove one of the entries at boot, but it was still trying to boot the System Reserved partition on the missing USB drive. In the end I deleted the entire entry for the USB drive which seemed to fix it.