11.10 + MDADM = initramfs on initial boot

[bomski]

I have a single 500gb OS drive; and 4x2TB drives (S/W RAID)

My OS had been playing up so I decided to do a clean install; booted Ubuntu CD; reinstalled OS (with updates)...

Upon booting for the first time with the fresh install; the RAID array wasn't detected; so installed MDADM, rebooted...

Was presented with the 'loading operating system' message (I assume from GRUB), then nothing... just a blank screen... Hit Ctrl+Alt+Del to force reboot; was then presented with the GRUB loader (has the memtest options etc)... Selected the standard boot option; then recieved the initramfs CLI; typed 'exit' as i'd never seen that before and was worried about damaging the data on the RAID volumes... then proceeded to boot into the OS and i could see and access my RAID array...

After shutting the machine down, and powering back up this morning; the same thing occured... I've taken the liberty to leave the system booted and am in the process of running a repair check on the RAID array (6TB volume so it's gonna be 24 hours from now)...

Has anyone got any suggestions as to what I can do as further steps if the check and repair process does not resolve this?

Thanks!

[bomski]

seeing as though nobody replied; a bit of perseverence and a lot of searching found the answer to my problem:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=11388915&postcount=18

I wrote a quick blog post documenting the problem and solution:

http://www.bomski.com/2012/01/ubuntu-11-10-with-raidnot-booting-after-installing-mdadm-read-on/

Hope this helps someone!

B

[arloth]

A million thanks for this! I recently decided I should get off of 10.10 for various reasons. The upgrade to 11.04 went fine, both my software raids came up great, but when going to 11.10 the first array would always initially show up as degraded only on boot.