I just put a USB hard drive into service, but find that unless the drive is connected to my PC the machine won't boot and drops to a shell. Below is the line I added to fstab. I thought that the option "noauto" would prevent the machine from trying to mount the drive /dev/sdb /usbdrive ext3 user,noauto,rw 0 2 What am I doing wrong? Any advice is welcome. Dick -- Yes indeed...the Hokey Pokey *is* what its all about!