I haven't figured out why I'm the only one running into issues, but here is some follow-up...
Obviously, there must be some hardware differences between the two boxes I can replicate with and everyone else. But now, I'm also suspicious of a kernel issue. I de-archived the initramfs for my working Sabayon-Daily-Xfce-20120527 and the initramfs for S9-Xfce-final in order to explore for differences. I found the busybox mount command always locks up (in both initramfs versions) when I try to mount an extended partition in my custom 3.4.3 kernel. In fact, it locks up so hard I can't kill the mount command even with 'kill -s 9 <pid>', and I have to hard reset my computer instead of being able to shut down normally. However, the Sabayon-Daily-Xfce-20120527 has a 3.3 kernel. If I manually run the same busybox mount command when booted with the Sabayon 3.3 kernel, I successfully got an error returned (which is what's expected). Here are some (boring) details of how I went about my testing. Step One: Mount the iso image for the working S9-pre-daily and S9-final, and copy each sabayon.igz initramfs to a separate working directory. Step Two: Extract the initramfs contents zcat sabayon.igz | (while true; do cpio -i -d -H newc --no-absolute-filenames || exit; done) Step Three: Attempt to mount /dev/sda4 (the extended partition that is giving issues on my sytsem) with the busybox in each version as per the mount command in the init scripts. The init scripts mount with something similar to: <initramfs>/bin/mount -r -t udf /dev/sda4 /mnt/temp Where <initramfs>/bin/mount is actually a link to <initramfs>/bin/busybox (busybox knows what command to run based on the name of the static link used to start it). Summary of Results: If I run the busybox mount command booted with a 3.3 kernel, I get: # s9pre-xfce/bin/mount -r -t udf /dev/sda4 /mnt/temp/ mount: mounting /dev/sda4 on /mnt/sabayon-btrfs-source/ failed: Invalid argument If I run the same busybox mount command from my 3.4.3 kernel, it just locks up, and one of my processors spins up to 100% trying to mount. The busybox mount command can't be killed at this point.
