I have installed openSUSE onto my laptop. Then I removed my secondary HDD, and voila, fstab thusly broke. Which made systemd throw a fit, constantly forcing an emergency mode - which was, in turn, bugged (systemd launches two shells on the same terminal, so everything becomes garbled). I was left with no option but to boot from a fricking rescue DVD.
At that point, I have deduced that the logical conclusion was popping my Win7 DVD back in.
Interestingly enough, server-grade Linux OSes we use (SLES, SUSE) don't seem to exhibit this behaviour. Still, that matters little for when I can't use them.