The 2TB disk I used as an archive of GUB builds was reported to be failing by the BIOS SMART monitor. I managed to boot into the OS, but any attempt to read from the disk was paralysingly slow. I thought the best bet was to take it out and possibly read it with a USB interface. Successfully did that and confirmed that it was essentially unusable - very slow reads.
Booted the system up. No go. It reported a fail and directed me to read the boot logfile. This seemed to show that it was still expecting that disk. Tried umount but had no effect. After a fair amount of hunting, I found a page advising editing etc/fstab. Used Nano to try that, and #'d out the apparently offending entry. It now boots. Seems a bit of a duff system that can't work out that a disk that isn't there should be ignored. On Windows swapping disks in and out causes no problems at all. That's another hour or so of my life gone. -- Phil Holmes
