Ubuntu – Don’t wait for user input on errors while booting

11.04bootheadlessserver

I'm running 11.04 server, headless, and at a certain point it didn't boot anymore: it just stopped. It seems like I made a mistake with some of the disks, the fstab or the raid config, anycase one of the arrays couldn't be mounted.

What happens is that there is some fancy screen (too fancy for my old LCD, but that's another question) saying Couldn't mount /foobar. Press s to continue or [..].

What I want is that it continues automatically. If I reboot I should check if that worked, fine, but I don't want to guess what button to press for it to continue, and I certainly don't want to have to run it with some sort of screen. Obviously, if / fails to mount then moving on is kinda hard to do. Ok. I get it, but when some raid doesn't come up, I have to boot to fix it.

How can I have ubuntu server 11.04 skip all but the fatal errors?

Best Answer

After A LOT of looking around I came across a Ubuntu Forums question that should solve your issue;

Fixed it by editing /etc/fstab

Edit the line with the affected drive, and add the following option: nobootwait

/dev/sdax /media/drive auto rw,user,exec,nobootwait 0 0

Reference

This will obviously only work for drive mount errors not ALL errors, I'm not certain how you could ignore all errors regardless but I would think that you would want to know what the actual error is.

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I had a similar problem. Here's how I fixed it (what I remember at least; I was basically just following some forum posts I found, mixed with some experimenting).

Press M to do a manual recovery.
run mount -o remount /. IIRC / is mounted read-only, so this will remount it for writing.
run dpkg --configure -a.
Type Ctrl+D to exit the shell and reboot.
Hopefully, it should boot fine so you can finish the upgrade. I actually don't remember exactly how I did that, sorry. I followed the instructions from the Ubuntu forums, but I can't find the post right now. I'll look for the instructions I followed or maybe someone else can answer it.

Ubuntu – How to force Ubuntu to boot on a stuck boot menu

The answer to this one can be found in the grub file /etc/grub.d/00_header

make_timeout ()
{
    cat << EOF
if [ "\${recordfail}" = 1 ]; then
  set timeout=-1
else
  set timeout=${2}
fi
EOF
}

Setting the timeout value to -1 will stop the count down. Change the value to a value > 0 i.e. set timeout=10

this section of the file would look like

make_timeout ()
{
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if [ "\${recordfail}" = 1 ]; then
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else
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fi
EOF
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Then run

sudo update-grub2

Best Answer

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