Home Media Server — pi armbian stuck due to missing removable drive

So, I setup few SBCs (Raspberry Pi, Orange Pi) as mini-servers for many kind of purpose at home. One of them is a media-server, it is plugged into multiple removable drives (few USB sticks and one 3TB self-powered seagate 3.5″ enclosure).

I setup the drive to auto-mount on boot using fstab.

One day, because I use one of the USB stick, it stopped working. It seems that the system check and wait for the missing drive (since it’s declared explicitly on fstab)

UUID=XXXX-XXXX / ext4 defaults,noatime,nodiratime,commit=600,errors=remount-ro 0 1
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,nosuid 0 0
/var/swap none swap sw 0 0
UUID="XXXX-XXXX" /mnt/usb auto user,umask=000,utf80 0
UUID="XXXX-XXXX" /mnt/hdd exfat defaults,auto,umask=000,users,rw 0 0

The fix is to add nofail option to your fstab entry. Refer to man systemd.mount

nofail
With nofail, this mount will be only wanted, not required, by local-fs.target or remote-fs.target. This 
means that the boot will continue even if this mount point is not mounted successfully.

So my fstab entry modified into:

UUID=XXXX-XXXX / ext4 defaults,noatime,nodiratime,commit=600,errors=remount-ro 0 1
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,nosuid 0 0
/var/swap none swap sw 0 0
UUID="XXXX-XXXX" /mnt/usb auto user,umask=000,utf80,nofail 0
UUID="XXXX-XXXX" /mnt/hdd exfat defaults,auto,umask=000,users,rw,nofail 0 0

Now I can freely remove the removable drive without causing boot to stuck.

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