mountpoint not existent, droping to single user mode

[claudiu vasadi]

Hello fellas,

I have a 8.0 i386 vmware machine for the sake of testing the following
behavior:

What happened when a "secondary" hdd cannot be mounted at boot ? From
experience I know the OS drops to single user mode, which I find incredibly
stupid because a "non-OS" hdd should not stop the OS from booting up
(imagine the hdd has a malfunction and then you get lucky enough to get a
power surge - the OS won't come up because of a darn non-OS-important hdd).

TEST scenario:
2 hdd's. The system is installed on the first one, and the second one has
"/mnt/2" as mountpoin. The 2nd disk was labeled and a new ufs partition was
created. I added the corresponding fstab entries and then I deliberately
removed the "/mnt/2" folder.

FYI: this "secondary" hdd has no data on it whatsoever.

Then I rebooted and of course the system went in single user mode. And now
my question: "WHY????" (I know that "rc" finishes abnormally)

The hdd has no relevant data on it, the OS has no files on it ... basically
it does not get in the way of anything (except the perfect execution of the
"rc" framework).

Anyway, it seems to me that "secondary" hdd's mount failure should be
"ignored" and an OS should be able to come up if one mountpoint does not
exist or if an entry in fstab is wrong (again, I am talking about non-OS
related hdd/mountpoints).

To make things worst, I tested a RHEL5 and the system booted without any
problems even if the "secondary" hdd's mp was missing.





Can someone explain this "weird?" behavior ?