I decided to setup an old AMD 1.7 GHz system I had as a BackupPC server to back up a few machines I have and experienced an issue with a USB 2.0 Hard Drive. I thought I’d share my situation in case someone else runs into a similar situation.
My BackupPC server has 2 internal IDE hard drives and an external USB 2.0 750 GB SATA hard drive, which is used to store the backups. After I had completed the installation of Ubuntu 9.04 Server edition and rebooted I received the following error during the file system checks.
Failed to open the device 'UUID=2b1da3c5-d190-47c9-8f39-760100368e2c' : No Such file or directory
fsck died with exit status 8
...fail!
* File system check failed.
A log is being saved in /var/log/fsck/checkfs if that location is writable.
Please repair the file system manually.
* A maintenance shell will now be started.
CONTROL-D will terminate this shell and resume system boot.
After researching the error and trying various suggestions I realized that all I needed to do was exclude the external USB hard drive from having it’s file system checked during startup. I solved the issue by editing /etc/fstab and setting the entry for the USB hard drive’s PASS column to a 0, which essentially tells fsck to not check the file system.
Before:
# /var was on /dev/sdc1 during installation
UUID=2b1da3c5-d190-47c9-8f39-760100368e2c /var reiserfs relatime 0 2
After:
# /var was on /dev/sdc1 during installation
UUID=2b1da3c5-d190-47c9-8f39-760100368e2c /var reiserfs relatime 0 0
After this little modification to /etc/fstab, I rebooted and once the system came up, I manually mounted the device for my USB 2.0 hard drive as such and all was good.
sudo mount /dev/sdc1
By the way BackupPC setup and configuration can be a little challenging, so I recommend aside from the official documentation the following link, which I’ve found to still be relevant for both Debian and Ubuntu.
