** Description changed:

  Yesterday I did a fresh install of Natty amd64. I used the PXE installer
  so all packages are up to date right after installation.
  
  I partitioned the disk to have two software raid1 devices. One for swap, one 
for / with xfs.
  Installation completed successfully, grub was installed to MBR.
  
  The system has a >95% failure rate in booting.
  At first it would hang on a purple screen. I blindly typed "reboot" at this 
screen, which worked. So I figured out that it would boot to a shell but not 
show it.
  Then, I added "nosplash" to the kernel command line and removed "quiet".
  
  This revealed that the system drops into a BusyBox shell labled "initramfs" 
when booting fails.
  Unfortunately, I cannot tell whether it shows any errors on screen because 
the BusyBox shell resets the screen buffer, CTRL+PageUp does not work.
  
  Please help me how to figure out what is wrong. Either tell me which log file 
I can search for the very first booting messages OR release a package update 
which fixes the screen-clearing of the initramfs shell.
  If you do that I will take the effort of doing the 10-20 boot attempts to get 
to the point where I can update the packages...
  If the initramfs-boot-process is logged anywhere I can check the log files 
without getting the system to boot through a bootable USB stick...
+ 
+ ==== SRU Justification ====
+ 
+ IMPACT: Users who install on a degraded RAID1 or who lose a disk drive
+ will be unable to boot.
+ 
+ TEST CASE:
+ 
+ 1. Install a natty system with root on a software RAID1
+ 2. After booting once, shutdown
+ 3. remove one disk entirely
+ 4. boot the system, it may drop to initramfs, or it may boot degraded
+ 5. reboot, this time it should reliably drop to initramfs
+ 6. poweroff and add the disk in again, it should now boot degraded
+ 7. install updated mdadm
+ 8. repeat steps 2-5 , it should pass and NOT drop to initramfs
+ 
+ REGRESSION POTENTIAL: The fix that has been uploaded to oneiric already
+ takes care to err on the side of responding to degraded arrays. Still
+ mdadm is very sensitive and so probably needs a bit of extra testing to
+ ensure that it works properly, including passing the usual RAID1 iso
+ install tests (with the additional step of installing the mdadm package
+ from proposed right after install)

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/778520

Title:
  install on degraded raid1 does not boot, drops to initramfs shell

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