I've been using Linux since 2011, and Ubuntu since 2014; I'm currently running 16.04 and will likely upgrade to MATE 20.04 in the near future.
Upgrading means I'll be recreating my /etc/fstab manual entries again, so my multiple volumes mount at the mount points I expect them to. However, I've recently encountered an issue where a hardware failure killed access to several partitions on one drive (IDE controller apparently failed), and since those partitions were hard-coded in /etc/fstab my system wouldn't boot without access to them.
I've searched online man pages and old questions, and found "nofail" but this appears to be intended to allow boot to complete if an external storage device isn't connected -- for instance, a USB backup drive.
Will "nofail" also work correctly for internal drives in case of, say, a loose cable or hardware failure, or is there some other method to ensure I can boot even if one or more (non-system) partitions fail to mount?