Lubuntu Mount Boot Error

I recently had an issue with an older notebook running Lubuntu 22.04 LTS. The graphical user interface failed to start, and I received the following error message

Failed to start default target: Transaction for graphical.target 
is destructive (emergency.target has 'start' job queued, but 
'stop' is included in transaction)

I had previously mounted an external USB hard drive via the GUI and tested around a bit, as I normally only do this via the CLI.

The next time the system booted, the boot process was put into emergency mode because the resource defined in etc/fstab, in this case the external file system, was not available. The entry in the fstab file was therefore set as if the file system should always be available.

The solution was pretty simple. I just commented out the entry for the external USB hard drive in fstab. The system booted up without any issues. I could also have set nofail in the fstab entry, which would mean that the boot process would continue even if the mounting of the file system fails. It should also work with x-systemd.device-timeout=10s. This means that the system gives up on mounting the file system after the timeout and also continues the boot process.

Example:

UUID=<uuid>  /mnt/backup  ext4  defaults,nofail,x-systemd.device-timeout=10s  0  2