The disk drive for /media/SDbackup is not ready yet or not present

Question

On an Acer Aspire One 522 netbook, the boot process stalls with the message: "The disk drive for /media/SDbackup is not ready yet or not present. Continue to wait, press S to skip or M for manual recovery."

If I eject the relevant SDcard and re-insert it (essentially using the wait option), boot-up continues normally, and the card is mounted.

If I press Esc, the message displayed is:

fsck from util-linux 2.20.1
Ubuntu: clean, 382442/1343488 files, 1480572/5349632 blocks

If I press M, the message displayed is: Filesystem check or mount failed

Interestingly, on a Dell Inspiron laptop, a similar SDcard is mounted automatically on boot-up without the above-noted message appearing.

To provide some background on the netbook system, listings from the fdisk command and the contents of the fstab file are appended below.

Note that using "/dev/sdb1 /media/SDbackup/..." or "UUID=AAC4-9403 /media/SDbackup/..." in fstab produces the same boot-time message; however, the latter entry also produces double listings for SDbackup in the (Gnome Classic) "Places" menu. Consequently, it is currently commented out in fstab.

I have run fsck on the card. This did not identify any errors. I have also re-formatted the card. I used a different SDcard in the card reader. Nothing seems to make a difference to the boot process stalling.

There seem to be multiple bug reports about similar issues with this boot-time warning message but I am unable (in what appears to me to be a complex logging system) to determine if there has been any fix.

Can anyone suggest another approach to mount the Sdcard automatically on boot-up? The intention is to have this available for "real-time" backup of a data partition using inosync.

Output from fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders, total 234441648 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x6adaea7a

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1            2048    30722047    15360000   12  Compaq diagnostics
/dev/sda2   *    30722048    30926847      102400    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3        30926848   164806655    66939904    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda4       164808704   234440703    34816000    5  Extended
/dev/sda5       164810752   182761471     8975360    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda6       182763520   191641599     4439040   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda7       191643648   234440703    21398528   83  Linux

Disk /dev/sdb: 7985 MB, 7985954816 bytes
231 heads, 28 sectors/track, 2411 cylinders, total 15597568 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1            8192    15597567     7794688    b  W95 FAT32

Listing of /etc/fstab

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
proc            /proc           proc    nodev,noexec,nosuid 0       0
# / was on /dev/sda7 during installation
UUID=691436b3-52fe-4d4c-9a0c-70a778ca0e57 /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1
# swap was on /dev/sda6 during installation
UUID=a791c8fd-18f1-418e-bd2e-2451890f14dd none            swap    sw              0       0
#Entries for DataDisk and SDbackup
/dev/sda5    /media/DataDisk/ ntfs-3g defaults,user,locale=en_US.utf8 0 0
/dev/sdb1    /media/SDbackup/ vfat  auto,users,uid=1000,gid=100,dmask=027,fmask=137,utf8  0  0
#UUID=AAC4-9403    /media/SDbackup/ vfat  auto,users,uid=1000,gid=100,dmask=027,fmask=137,utf8  0  0

Answer 1

Try reactivating the last line in /etc/fstab by removing the # and deactivating the line immediately before that by inserting # as first character. The reason might be that the drive is not recognized as /dev/sdb but the UUID should work.