Had an extremely frustrating experience with this bug while attempting to re-install a Debian system with Ubuntu 12.02 x86_64, and while trying to debug 11.10. The main issue was that by the time I was dropped to a shell the prompt asking if I wanted to boot degraded was long and gone from my scroll back and covered with mdadm output - the only evidence that something was up was a "Timed Out" message with no context.
Although the install was onto a single non-raided drive, and there were no file systems in /etc/fstab located on raid devices I experienced constant hanging on boot as there were other non-system disks present which were members of a RAID5 array which was unable to start. After finally tracking this down the easiest out was to modify /usr/share /initramfs-tools/scripts/mdadm-functions to exit out of the degraded_arrays() and mountroot_fail() functions so I could get the system running and work on the RAID array at a later date. I would suggest that rather than timing out and dropping to a shell the best default option would be to simply not start the array at all, display a message to that effect, and let the user deal with the issue if the system is able to boot. If the system is not able to boot due to the raid array holding a system volume and there are concerns about allowing arrays to start degraded by default it is more reasonable to at least continue booting and hit an error, such as failed to mount / (which would probably drop them to a shell anyway), rather than stopping the boot process altogether. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/872220 Title: Fails to boot when there's problems with softraid To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mdadm/+bug/872220/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
