mjhjmtu

It seems that I have added incorrect record to /etc/fstab:

//servername/share /mnt/share cifs defaults,username=myuser 0 0

When I did mount -a, it asked user password to mount network share. It seems that it cannot proceed without password on boot, so it is just hung.

How can I fix fstab to prevent boot failure?

It seems that I've found a solution:

• at the grub prompt, hit a to append options


• add init=/bin/bash to the end of the kernel command line and press enter

The system will boot to a prompt like 'bash-3.2#' enter the following commands at the prompt

• mount -o remount,rw /


• vim /etc/fstab

edit the fstab file commenting the errors by adding a # at the begining of each problematic line, save the file

• reboot by pressing CTRL+ALT+DEL

How about removing the entry, creating a snapshot and then trying to change your /etc/fstab so you have a working snapshot you can roll back to?

According to the manpage mount.cifs you can also specify a password via password=arg. Also, according to that manpage there is no argument username=arg but instead user=arg. But it might be different on your system, better check your manpage for the correct argument names.

The other easy way is booting to live-cd mode and mount the right partition. Then you can fix anything you want!

I found a solution to systems error kernel not loading
Use live cd to gain access to your existing installation. Once in reinstall Linux kernel :

pacman -S Linux

Then delete the fstab file from etc/fstab :

rm /etc/fstab

Now reinstall systemd:

pacman -S systemd

When reinstalling systemd it will automatically generate a new fstab file

Now reinstall the bootloader
in this case I use grub:

pacman -S grub os-prober

(os probe is useful if you have more than 1 os installed on your hdd/ssd)
Then

grub-install --target=i386-pc /dev/sda

Once finished make the configuration files:

grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Then unmount the partitions in use and reboot

umount /dev/sdX 
reboot

This should fix the problem, it worked for me.

May be I am too late. But this is FYI. In this situation you can use nano to load fstab and you can restart after editing the fstab.

sudo nano /etc/fstab