Solved Can I make fstab more robust?

I am wondering if there is anyway to make fstab handle failures more gracefully.

My example:
Adding my geom_raid to fstab I spelled the name wrong = Failed to boot and started in single user mode.
I pulled out all the drive sleds for my raid array = Same Failure

My array is not bootable and I use a small DOM for the OS. So it's failing with no problem on OS disk.
What can I do to make fstab robust? Maybe I should use another mounting mechanism instead for my array?
 
There are two options mentioned in fstab(5) which may help in your situation, namely failok and late.
I had mixed success with failok, however, for a filesystem which might fail, late is useful together with another measure, which is to launch sshd more early in the boot sequence. So, we may ssh into our machines even if any non-root mount would fail. For headless servers this may rescue your day. Where the hell did my wife stowed away the keyboard and the monitor?

In order to let sshd launch more early, we need to edit, /etc/rc.d/sshd:
Code:
...
# PROVIDE: sshd
# REQUIRE: NETWORKING
# BEFORE: mountcritremote
# KEYWORD: shutdown
...

Of course, sshd would work only if the rootfs is OK.
 
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