Arch Linux

charlie

Member

Registered: 2013-09-18

Posts: 57

Absent "nofail" external drive delaying startup

Hello,

The start up of my laptop is delayed by a "start job" on an absent external drive, essentially the message is

[***    ] A start job is running for: dev-disk-byid/x2duuid-1654180/...

I recognize the id of the device as the id of an external drive which is indicated as a "nofail" in fstab:

$ cat fstab
...
UUID=1654b180-08a6-473d-9db2-c2a592b7d98f	/media/ddext	ext4		nofail,users,rw		0 0
...

This device is not connected when the problem occurs (I did not test with the drive connected since I remarked the problem, but I cannot do this currently and I am not sure this would help).

All the mount options seems to have been passed to the .mount file:

$ cat systemd/generator/media-ddext.mount 
# Automatically generated by systemd-fstab-generator

[Unit]
SourcePath=/etc/fstab
Documentation=man:fstab(5) man:systemd-fstab-generator(8)

[Mount]
What=/dev/disk/by-uuid/1654b180-08a6-473d-9db2-c2a592b7d98f
Where=/media/ddext
Type=ext4
Options=nofail,users,rw

As I wasn't able to see how to fix this delay, I also tried to directly remove it with the following, but it did not work:

# systemctl set-property ddext.service TimeoutStartUSec=1s
Unknown assignment TimeoutStartUSec=1s.

So now I don't know what I should do.
What would be the problem here?

Last edited by charlie (2014-06-30 16:39:18)

dave.computer

Member

Registered: 2012-10-23

Posts: 15

Re: Absent "nofail" external drive delaying startup

I am also having the same problem, with some USB drives that are in my fstab with the nofail option.  I'm wondering if it is related to my recent system upgrade, which included systemd (213-9 -> 214-2)?

thisoldman

Member

From: Pittsburgh

Registered: 2009-04-25

Posts: 1,172

Re: Absent "nofail" external drive delaying startup

See https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1432500 for some help with this problem.

charlie

Member

Registered: 2013-09-18

Posts: 57

Re: Absent "nofail" external drive delaying startup

Thank you for the link (posted the same day as me...). I don't know if it would be relevant to merge the topics?

smoothdad

Member

From: Santa Monica, California

Registered: 2013-08-25

Posts: 2

Re: Absent "nofail" external drive delaying startup

I'm having the same issue that Charlie and Markus from the other thread are having but haven't been able to find a satisfactory solution either.  It's certainly related to a fairly recent systemd update.

* Edit
I just updated systemd to 215-4, and this appears to be fixed now.

Last edited by smoothdad (2014-07-12 05:13:22)

dave.computer

Member

Registered: 2012-10-23

Posts: 15

Re: Absent "nofail" external drive delaying startup

Updating systemd to 215-4 solved the problem for me as well.