In other words, sometimes it may just be better to conform than to try to have things your way. Take Gnome for example, Fedora 18 Gnome in this case, and I'm sure several Fedora releases previous.
I prefer to mount partitions automatically at boot with entries in fstab. I don't want to click this and then click that and enter a password to mount a partition. That's just not what I want. I want the partition mounted during bootup so that it is available to me immediately. This is all well and good and works flawlessly, until something goes wrong. Really wrong this morning.
Apparently the computer rebooted at some point over night. Who knows why? Not something I'm even going to dwell on, but this morning I found mysef staring at a black screen where the computer had obviously stalled during the boot process. Something was wrong. I played around a bit, rebooted 4-5 times and eventually ended up with the "press CTRL/D to get a prompt" message. I played around some more and rebooted a few more times. No love, although the boot process got further along. It looked like the system was looking for a disk / partition that it couldn't find and was hanging at that point. Suspecting a hard disk problem I rebooted yet again and went into the BIOS. Sure enough, the second disk was nowhere to be found! I unplugged it and rebooted. Still no love. More errors. What now?
Since I multi-boot I rebooted and selected Fedora 17, hoping that it would get me to a desktop or command prompt. F17 booted up after spewing some similar error messages and I was able to reach the desktop. At that point I decided that this was indeed a disk problem so I commented out the mount for /dev/sdb1 in the F17 fstab. Then I mounted the F18 partition and did the same to it's fstab. Confident that I had solved the booting issues for F18 I again rebooted and selected Fedora 18. Success. The system booted as expected.
My point? In my opinion, if I had not insisted on automatic mounting of the second hard disk partitions none of this would have happened. I would not have spent half an hour diagnosing a broken computer / OS and would likely have been greeted by a normal blank screen that only requires mouse movement or keypress to bring back my desktop.
That said, I'll still be doing things my way. I'll install another disk, get the UUID and setup a mount in fstab :C
I prefer to mount partitions automatically at boot with entries in fstab. I don't want to click this and then click that and enter a password to mount a partition. That's just not what I want. I want the partition mounted during bootup so that it is available to me immediately. This is all well and good and works flawlessly, until something goes wrong. Really wrong this morning.
Apparently the computer rebooted at some point over night. Who knows why? Not something I'm even going to dwell on, but this morning I found mysef staring at a black screen where the computer had obviously stalled during the boot process. Something was wrong. I played around a bit, rebooted 4-5 times and eventually ended up with the "press CTRL/D to get a prompt" message. I played around some more and rebooted a few more times. No love, although the boot process got further along. It looked like the system was looking for a disk / partition that it couldn't find and was hanging at that point. Suspecting a hard disk problem I rebooted yet again and went into the BIOS. Sure enough, the second disk was nowhere to be found! I unplugged it and rebooted. Still no love. More errors. What now?
Since I multi-boot I rebooted and selected Fedora 17, hoping that it would get me to a desktop or command prompt. F17 booted up after spewing some similar error messages and I was able to reach the desktop. At that point I decided that this was indeed a disk problem so I commented out the mount for /dev/sdb1 in the F17 fstab. Then I mounted the F18 partition and did the same to it's fstab. Confident that I had solved the booting issues for F18 I again rebooted and selected Fedora 18. Success. The system booted as expected.
My point? In my opinion, if I had not insisted on automatic mounting of the second hard disk partitions none of this would have happened. I would not have spent half an hour diagnosing a broken computer / OS and would likely have been greeted by a normal blank screen that only requires mouse movement or keypress to bring back my desktop.
That said, I'll still be doing things my way. I'll install another disk, get the UUID and setup a mount in fstab :C