[Bradford] Nearly working laptop

[Devo Too]

Hi Folks,

With thanks to John Hudson and the author of this blog 
http://averagelinuxuser.com/a-step-by-step-arch-linux-installation-guide/ 
I now have a laptop which kind of works, a huge improvement upon where I 
was on Friday.

It stutters to boot and will only shut down when its power is shut off. 
On boot, it has problems with a UUID which it targets 130 seconds to 
commit and moves on when it fails, so a slow boot. It turns out that 
UUID is for the fourth and final partition, /dev/sda4 /home.

It goes into kernel panic on reboot or shutdown, so the power switch 
comes into play.

/etc/fstab has multiple identical entries for three of the four 
partitions. In turn:

/dev/sda1 /boot/efi 1 entry
/dev/sda2	/   3 entries
/dev/sda3 swap (none) 2 entries
/dev/sda4 /mnt/home 2 entries.

the order they are listed in is / / efi home swap / home swap

The layout is
# /dev/sdaX
UUID ~blahblah~
(blank line)
# /dev etcetera

and the kernel panic happened at each shutdown or reboot. So I added a 
single # to each uncommented repeat and hit reboot. A blank screen 
appeared with a cursor flickering, top left hand corner. Power button, 
same cure as before.

Booting up again, the system is still looking for /home partition. I 
haven't added any ordinary user yet and there is no data in there. Would 
adding a user with ~/username/ help?

Any sysadmins or gifted amateurs out there to point me in the right 
direction, please? Is fstab the right place to look? If not, what else 
should I be doing?

TIA,

Mike