[Techtalk] fstab options for removable USB disk drive

[Deborah Gronke Bennett]

I'm running Ubuntu 7.04 (yes I know it's a little old). I have added a 
USB disk drive to my system. I wanted the disk to mount in a different 
location than the USB automounting, so I created an fstab entry for the 
drive:

/dev/sdb1       /media/usbmedia         ext3   defaults 0 2

Occasionally I take this laptop elsewhere, and I want to leave the USB 
drive at home. When I boot the machine, it halts with an error when 
/dev/sdb1 is not found. I have to bypass the maintenance shell with 
ctl-D to get the system to boot up all the way.

What I would like is some options on the fstab line so that the system 
will attempt to mount /dev/sdb1, but will continue if the device is not 
found.

So far, I have tried this with no success:
/dev/sdb1       /media/usbmedia         ext3    
defaults,noauto,user,errors=continue 0 2

I thought noauto would keep the filesystem from being mounted at boot 
time, and errors=continue would allow the system to continue to boot 
even if there were mount errors. But every time I boot without the USB 
drive connected, it stops in the maintenance shell.

Thanks for any tips!
-deborah